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THE FIVE BOOKS OF MR. MOSES

1. MR. MOSES

MANY masters has a man in his moment of living. In one’s individual genesis one may have a Jenkins for maths., a M. Jean for French, an Old Cocky for Latin, and, when the gods are good—as they once were to an East End scribe—a Lakin and a Miss Sweeny for English literature. Many are there still in middle-age who once had a Moses for their master in Judaism.

No. Not Moses, son of Amram. It is not Moses Amramson one would venture to portray and analyse in a couple of hundred pages. True, his life has not yet been written. The pages of his autobiography are the years of the world. And then what mortal scribe may vie with his official biographer, Israel? And Israel will not surrender the pen until Death take it from his recording fingers. But perhaps Israel is shunned by Death, and so the recording of the biography of that first Moses will never be done.

Of another Moses is this tale. A Mr. Moses Moses.

The East End scribe already referred to was under him in the Jews’ Free Schools in standard Four. A little man with a crude moustache and never the cane in his hand—in those days! Yet was his class relatively attentive and well-behaved. Always a smile played round his somewhat full lips. Not quite on his lips, but round them. A smile humorous, sarcastic, whimsical, but queerly unjoyous. He would, for example, teach history in a funny, disjointed fashion. Would neglect the class-readers to linger in cynical splash-talk on some of England’s most famous heroes. And by the time he had come to a too-speedy period, his boys had gotten uncomfortably aware that those most famous of heroes were possibly neither so heroic nor so deservedly famous.

Even at that time the children under him sensed him to be a stricken man. Not stricken to prostration, but stricken, nevertheless. He was a widower with an only child. When any of his boys would meet him, as they often did, week-ends and summer evenings, in the streets of the East End, they would raise their caps and stare shyly and wonderingly at the lovely little olive-complexioned, black-brown-eyed girl in dainty white or pink or blue, who clutched tightly her father’s hand. And not only the schoolboys stared wonderingly at the child’s loveliness. For even then she flamed with the beauty that was to be her early undoing, her own death in anguish and shame, and her father’s dumb sorrow and after-strength.

How Mr. Moses had loved his little Rachel! During his solitary week of mourning for her worse-than-death, the neighbours remembered in their gossip the child’s mother. A sweet-faced Rachel Morris it was Mr. Moses had loved and married. A pupil teacher at the Jews’ Free School. Without a penny. But in those days dowries were not quite so hunted by young Jews as now, and young Jewesses did not reach out so for social vanities. Kisses then gave no painter’s colic, and Jewish girls were not ashamed of their naked faces.

The wedding presents they received proved the practical goodheartedness of their friends. Their men-colleagues clubbed together and sent them a leather-cloth covered Chesterfield suite; the lady teachers presented them with a full set of crockery, both meat and milk, and a special set, of finer clay, for Passover. Moses invested in twin beds at the auctioneers round the corner of his lodgings, and the bride brought forward with coy pride the bedding and house-linen which, having lost her parents in childhood, she had slowly amassed for herself in order not to come to her bridegroom empty-handed.

In a little house off Brick Lane they made their home; and they loved one another with a love enthralling beyond the ordinary for a whole year, at the close of which Mrs. Moses gave birth to a womanchild and died.

And the neighbours in their gossip remembered; and contrasted that blessed week of passionate and holy sorrow for the beloved dead with the wild dejection and fanatic despair and uncompanionable anguish and brooding with which the treacherous passing of that womanchild was celebrated by the unbalanced father.

He had named her Rachel after his beloved dead; and she had become his idol.

God! would that she had only died as died his first Rachel! Only died! for then he might have wept for her—recited the kaddish for her soul—seen her dear body laid to rest in the House of Life with her own kind. Only died! for then he would have been privileged with his own hands to take up a spade and let fall a few clods of brown clay on her coffin while none could deny him the luxury of tears. On returning to his desolated home he would have pathetically displayed the rent over his heart, and none but would have comforted him as he sat on the low mourner-stool. And the wise and saintly Reb Zalman, Rabbi of the Shtiebel off Commercial Street, would have visited him with holy words of solace derived from the sacred magic of the Talmud; would, indeed, have expounded the Mishna or the Book of Job at the very table of their love in honour of her free soul heavenward soaring.

Only died! Only died! for the body of his second Rachel was not dead—fouled, dragged in the mire, not dead. And nothing more left of her soul than a scribbled, tear-spotted letter, pitifully brief, but all too long for happiness to survive.

‘O father, I can’t help it. I can’t help it. He isn’t a Jew, and I loved him, and I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you. It was my fault—my fault—and I must go away. I must go away. I must go away. I can’t help it. I can’t help it. O tatteshu—father—daddy darling—I can’t help it.’

Moses raved in mad silences the night through. The next morning he sent a note to the Head that his daughter had died the day before, but that there would be no funeral. He took up a sharp knife and made a great gash in his garments over the broken heart of himself and sat down on the low, cold fender-stool, and sat and sat and sat in stony silence. And the few that dared intrude felt their speech freeze in face of the mute unwelcome, and silently went away.

On the Sabbath eve he went not to Synagogue as other mourners go to receive public condolence; but when the week of his mourning ended he washed and changed his linen and his suit of clothes and returned to school.

And his scholars and his colleagues sensed a radical change in him. Not so much the change obvious in his hollow cheek and thinned mouth. He had become irritably shy, as though the world grated on him. And there was a painful stammer in his speech.

Naturally he was the last to hear of the lure that had beguiled her who for seventeen years had been his main raison d’être to a betrayal so much bitterer than the slim treachery of the Cheating Angel.

Just over against the too-swiftly-ripening Rachel’s bedroom window, at the back of the house, was the Medical Mission to the Jews, in whose top story dwelt an earnest old woman of a parson-doctor who worked very hard to snare Jewish souls for his Christ. A simple-minded man, he verily believed that all Jews who did not accept their co-religionist of Galilee as God’s only-begotten son would go to hell. And hell to the Reverend Doctor Darrel was an axiomatic, terrible fact. Ghastly devils at Satan’s command hurled earth’s damned souls into fires beyond earthly imaginings. He loved the Jews for that they were the kin of his God; and he would save them from hell if only they would let him. To his sorrow, however, the only Jews that offered themselves for conversion were either obvious fools—mentally deficient—or equally obvious rogues. Nevertheless, he persisted, directing his energies to snaring the ghetto-women with free medicine and courteous attention to the long tales of their ailments, and bribing the ghetto-children with sweets and toys and picture-cards to New Testament story-hours.

This missionary parson-doctor had implicit belief in the truth of his faith. He also had courage—and a nephew.

Naturally, Moses was the last to hear of the lure that had deprived him of his idol. But something he did hear. Of a great quarrel between the missionary and his nephew and of how the latter had entered the Catholic sect and was become a priest.

Years passed, and Moses became aware from a passing hint here and a passing word there that his daughter’s betrayal had happed through one of the ever-changing young men who formed the missionary’s group and who sang hymns and preached the Word at the street corner. And from the day this impression impinged upon his surface mind, he regarded the missionary, whenever he came upon him, with a personal and searching interest.

2. REB ZALMAN

Legend tells us that wondermen to the number of thirty-six never diminish in Jewry. Always are there these thirty-six saints who, like Moses, son of Amram, see God face to face. They need not be learned, but they shall be holy. To the onlooker they may not even seem pious, but they shall be holy. They are holy—and they exist ever. Your menial whom you despise—despise him not, for he may be one of those but for whom the world could not exist one fraction of a moment. Jewish folklore teems with miracles accorded by God to the sinfilled world for their sakes: for even the decree of the Eternal cannot stand if but one of this company of saints wrestle with Him in prayer. Abraham was of the band, nor could God destroy the twin-cities of wickedness so long as the patriarch stood against Him. Moses, son of Amram, challenged the Mighty One, blessed be He! to debate for the life of Israel, and won and annulled the divine decree. Of these we know, and of others who lived and strove with the Lord, and, like Jacob ben Izak, have limped away from our ken. But who the thirty-six are these days—who can tell? For it has been laid upon them that they shall not declare themselves, nor may they know one the other unless by divine intent.

Yet rumour will run its way, and now and then and here and there rise intimations, whispered under the breath, that one of the band has been recognized.

And some such half-uttered, half-bitten whispers circulated in the environment of the Shtiebel where the holy Reb Zalman ministered to men who, descendents of a Jewish sect in Poland that worshipped saintliness, vicariously described themselves as Saints (Chassiddim).

Reb Zalman gently chided the fanatic fancies and unauthorized imaginings of his wistful-eyed congregants, but what use his denials in face of the many wonders it was well known throughout the East End that he had wrought?—and besides, who ever heard of one of the band confessing himself?

And one day, some five years after that unsanctified week of mourning, Mr. Moses decided to get counsel of Reb Zalman. He craved a new way of life so that he might put together the broken pieces of his soul.

Somehow Moses, though a born teacher, had no longer any heart in his daily round. Even the daily Hebrew lesson evoked in him a sensation of futility. He would have liked to crowd the whole day into that one hour before lunch—and, when the gong sounded, he had told and taught his class so little! Confusedly was he aware that in this somehow lay hid salvation. All the love and care and longing that he had poured on his worse-than-dead betrayer were being pent up in his body and soul, and bursting for outlet. Yet he dared not decide for himself. He distrusted himself. Should once more his destiny mock him—should once more his angel of light turn to clay or to another foul nightmare of grinning putrifaction, then would he of a surety arise and curse God that had made him—aye, and cry out against Him that He was a delusion and a snare, and that He had made the world and all therein for a cruel whim that proved Him one with mankind’s traditional foe.

But no. In that direction lay madness ambushed. He would go to the Shtiebel.

To the ordinary man Reb Zalman was just an old, old Jew to whom the present world and its ways were but a bubble on the face of the waters of life; to whom nothing, perhaps, was real but the Talmud with its windows wide-giving on the old Jewish national life in its hey-day of golden temple and sacrificial splendour; to whom Yochanan ben Zakai, dead some nineteen hundred years ago, was a fact, and Lloyd George—an idle fancy.

Reb Zalman belonged to the past, and to reach his city of refuge one had, appropriately enough, to travel eastward.

In the heart of London’s ghetto—in itself (before the Great War) a kind of city of refuge—is a little sunken alley crowded with sprawling, healthy children, doorsteps, and backless occupied chairs. The scene is busy all day, but especially busy (or used to be) at night when fat, good-natured women cried their wares of beiguel and other confectionery delights in a ludicrous but forceful jargon of broad Cockney and Yiddish.

Passing through the press, Moses entered a yard totemically titled in which, with one exception, every house was a shop and tenement; the exception was the Shtiebel.

A single, large room the Shtiebel, combination of synagogue, house of study, library and clubroom for the disciples of Reb Zalman. From early morning till late at night the place was occupied. Prayers were conducted incessantly morning, noon and evening, and any week-day till noon you might find there the originals of Jacob Kramer’s Day of Atonement painting, in prayershawl and phylacteries, striding feverishly to and fro, or standing still and tense in an endless moment’s ecstasy of spiritual communion.

An embroidered plush curtain hung before the Ark enclosing the Scrolls of the Law in the centre of the eastern wall. A similar cloth covered the Reader’s table within the railed bema in the middle of the room. Little further attempt at decoration. Along the walls—hidden from view by great volumes closely packed—run bare benches and tables broad and solid where the study of the Talmud never ceases by day and for very few hours by night.

It was ten o’clock at night, but Reb Zalman was still seated at the head of the table to the right of the door, lecturing to a group of scholars on the laws regulating the relations between employers and employees in Jerusalem two thousand five hundred years ago. The average age of the scholars was about fifty years; in the day they were tailors, capmakers, hawkers, shopkeepers, middlemen and such like, but at night they became students—and Reb Zalman was the Head of their University, the Shtiebel.

On the left were gathered several young men from the Talmudical college close by. With the greedy avidity of the adolescent intellect, they had come to put in a little overtime with tomes similar to those in use in Reb Zalman’s class. At a third table was seated a group of all ages fiercely discussing politics and salt herrings as a relaxation from the strenuous life between the covers of the Talmud. Youngsters of twelve and thirteen years of age mingled with the disputants and absorbed and inwardly criticized the opinions of their elders.

Solitary figures here and there were deep in prayer, and a couple of old men in a corner chanted the songs of David King with the rhythm to which the ancient language so well lends itself.

Moses, the English Jew, accustomed to the somewhat vapid formalism of the more pretentious synagogues of Anglo-Jewry, felt, as he took in the scene before entering, the wonderful manner in which here the alien Jew was at home with his God; for he saw that it was God the Father, with whom his children need stand on no ceremony, that here was being worshipped. And he understood how it was that the Shtiebel to Reb Zalman had become a city of refuge—and might even be so to him.

Quietly he joined Reb Zalman’s class.

3. THE SCHOOL FOR HEBREW

A little while later Mr. Moses resigned from the Jews’ Free School, left his little house near Brick Lane, sold all his furniture, and rented a large empty room on the first floor in Whitechapel. The room had once been utilised as a tailoring factory, and still contained a long, rickety table which Moses made firm. He bought some forms, some old school desks and a small table; also a chair-bed and an old Yost typewriter; also many yards of green baize, some kitchen-ware, some stained-glass paper and a gas-ring. The green baize he made up into a pair of great curtains which divided the one-time factory into a fair-sized classroom and a small, narrow, kitchen-living-bedroom. The stained-glass window paper saved the trouble and cost of curtains. The classroom possessed two windows outlooking upon the open thoroughfare; and upon them he had sign-written:

MR. MOSES, SCHOOL FOR HEBREW.

He arranged with an old Gentile woman who tended the Sabbath fires of his neighbours to look after his new establishment and, for the rest, he fended for himself. So Moses, after consultation with Reb Zalman, began to reconstruct his life.

Not only was he become a Hebrew-Master. He entered the Zionist movement, then in its first practical stages. But he was not merely a political Zionist: he was become a fanatic for all things Jewish. He grew a little beard and was rarely seen with uncovered head; every custom in Jewry, original or ghetto-wrought, was become dear to him. Now and then he would come upon the zealous missionary, and regarded him with a personal and searching interest. And deep, deep in his heart he buried his sorrow out of reach of the blaring daylight, only to be exhumed and fondled in the dark and dumb watches of the nights.

Nights! Nights when he would take his sorrows up from their depths and brood over and play with them. He would lie on his penitential chair-bed, and the years would again and again turn back. His daughter Rachel was once more the comfort and nachas of his life. Who shall define that Jewish word nachas? It means pleasure—and something more; gratification and something more; joy and something more; happiness and something more. A Jew never has nachas in his own, personal good fortune. It is a kind of naïve gloating over the happiness of another—a child, parent, relative, friend—a sort of justification of one’s hopes—and something more. And he had hoped to have nachas in his second Rachel—nachas!—and she had left him for a goy—a missionary young Gentile—

Into his hell he would allow none to spy. To lie awake was bad, but to lie awake was nevertheless good. One did not sleep, one did not dream.

His pupils occupied so little of his time—from five to eight on schoolday evenings and on Sundays and school-holidays from ten in the morning till one. Pitifully tiny oases in the desert of his life-pain! He threw himself feverishly into Zionist activities, became in spite of his slight stammer—or perhaps because of it—a popular lecturer and propagandist for the Jewish National Fund, distributed collecting boxes to buy land in Palestine and endeavoured to inplant into his pupils a fierce love for all things Jewish. Among his scholars was a bright little boy named Davy Cohen.

4. THE COHENS

Sarah, Mrs. Barnett Cohen, sat in her kitchen rocking the cradle. She crooned in tune to her rocking and thought one Thursday evening of many things. Backward and forward pranced her thoughts. Now she wondered whether her husband would be working overtime. He was getting on, was her Barnett. A year ago they had succeeded in disconnecting workshop from house, and had moved into their present home. A greener family had taken over their old house and sublet the workroom to Mr. Moses the English Hebrew-master. What a blessing to have the home free from the whirr of the sewing machines, and her kitchen undirtied by the careless feet of the hands! And so familiar for her Davy the way to Cheder (Hebrew Class) . . . Her mind floated back to the little Russo-Jewish village of Pamunitzé. She, Sarah, took after her mother, may her soul rest in peace! who could never rest from scrubbing and tidying. Though poor—her father was only a tailor—their half of a wooden cottage in the bath-street was literally spotless. She recollected as a little child that Reb Zalman, now of the Shtiebel, would, though Rabbi of the townlet, often honour their home on a Sabbath afternoon and drink lemon-tea out of their samovar. A troubled look crossed her features. Here in London Reb Zalman never so honoured them. Her husband’s was the fault in that he was an open desecrator of the Jewish Sabbath. She sighed. Seven days and more he laboured each week and had no time for the synagogue. Of what use Davy’s Hebrew-master teaching the lad: Remember to keep the Sabbath day holy! . . . Yet was Barnett not really bad, though her religious mind could not easily brook his laxer logic. It was only the stress of making a living for her and Davy and the baby that drove him to work late on Friday nights to hurry on Saturday mornings to the workshop instead of the Duke’s Place Synagogue of which they were members. . . . Yes, it was nice to have one’s home to oneself—but just a little lonely. Not so lonely since the coming of little Leah. Her foot-rhythm changed as she hummed a lullaby from Goldfaden’s Yiddish opera, Shulamis.

Only with her left foot was she rocking the cradle. Her right foot was connected to her left hand by a skein of wool which her right hand rhythmically unravelled and wound into a ball. As she rocked and unravelled and wound and crooned, she appeared a shrewd-looking woman of about thirty-eight, pleasant, plump, shortish and of good colour, with high cheekbones and bright, black eyes very slightly asquint. She had put off her cleaning clothes and was now tidy and presentable in checked blouse, dark skirt, easy shoes and white apron. Soon the butcher would send her the Sabbath fowl, Barnett would perhaps come home earlier a little than usual and Davy would be back from Hebrew class. Meanwhile she rested and was content. The table was ready with bread and butter and cheese and pickled herring; the kettle was gurgling on the hob, the fire was cheerful, and if any visitor dropped in there was plenty of second-best fruit in the glass dish on the sideboard. Sarah looked round her with satisfaction.

The mantlepiece mirror shone resplendent in its frame of crinkled yellow paper, new-dressed last Passover, and doubled the lovely pink-and-white china atrocities she had paid for with old clothes. One of these ornaments the baby had broken when held up before the glass, and she must remind Barnett to mend it with some egg-white. And there was a letter that the postman had brought addressed to herself. Funny that. But when her little family came home she would know. She could not read much herself, but what she could not read, her Barnett could read, and what her Barnett could not read their clever little Davy could read. And so she would know soon. Meanwhile her thoughts narrowed down to attend to the first signs of her family’s homesteps, and her sad Jewish voice sang the lullaby of Shulamis:

Now a confident knock from the front door interrupted her modest trilling, and she started up. In one and the same moment she cuddled up the baby under its little eider-down, entangled herself, disentangled herself, flung the skein over a pink-and-white china atrocity that stood guard by the second-best fruit dish and hurried out into the lobby, to return in a trice to the cradle, calling in instinctive exhortation over her shoulder:

‘Vipe you feet on de mat, Barnett. I joost cleaned de kitchen!’

In truth was the kitchen floor spotless, and the pattern of the oilcloth—new last Passover—already fading under Sarah’s too-frequent onslaughts. The beloved steel fender was bright with the firelight’s ruddy reflections, and the axminster hearthrug—new last Passover—chatted in strident tones of oriental colouring, boasting its glories to humbler strips of carpet, old and threadbare from much beating and shaking and similar persecutions, that protected the oilcloth’s cleanliness and lay slily in wait for unwary feet.

With a preliminary shuffle in the lobby, Barnett entered.

Curious how husband and wife of the same build approximate as they live their lives together. Perhaps because they eat the same food and think more or less the same thoughts. Perhaps it is but a fancy, but this approximation is more rapid and intense when things go easily in married life. However that may be, the main features that differentiated the onlooker Barnett from his Sarah were his almost bald head and his trousers. Leaving his stock of suspiciousness and subtlety in the shop, Barnett in private life was more phlegmatic and genial than Sarah, whose business lay at home.

In his morning coat (shopwear only) Barnett could not possibly feel at home; he unharnessed himself, stretched his arms and hummed instinctively a traditional wordless melody of his folk:

Before the final BAM! he had taken down a coat-hanger from the back of the door, removed from it an old comfortable alpaca jacket (housewear only), replaced it with the morning coat, and wrapped it round his upper portliness. He grunted contentedly and left off his workaday world with a breezy attempt at humour.

‘Nu, my vife, ’ow’s de babily improvin’? Did it say Googoo again or did it better go for to break de odder onnement—ha?’

Sarah turned round from the cradle in a little pet.

‘Anyvay,’ she retorted, ‘YOU didn’t haf to buy de onnement, anyvay! So you donnt haf to be sooch a miser to y’ronn chil’. De onnements—not vone cost you a penny! All de ol’ clo’s—all de rags——’

But Barnett was not to be done out of his humour.

‘Rags! rags!’ he exclaimed in comic rage. ‘My best vorkin’ trouserrs mit onnly two holes, und no patches yet—rags! I could haf made vone patch like no vone vould be able to tell; und de odder no vone could see from under my coat-tails—ha? Rags she calls it—rags!’

He remained standing in the centre of the kitchen with his palms appealing to the gas light. But Sarah declined to be entertained.

‘Gorn, Barnett!’ she rejoined. ‘You know I donnt like you jokes on Baby.—Such a real und truly good-behave chil’ she been to-day dat I donnt know!’ With a tender hand she patted the cradle coverlet ere she approached her man and laid her fingers on his alpaca lapel. ‘I joost filled her sveet little stommach und she’ll sleep a long time. Oi, Barnett!’ she continued in a sudden burst of rare yielding. ‘You cannt know vhat a commferrt de baby is to me! Since you got de separate vorrkshop—all de day to be by mineself—you in de business und Davy in school und Hebrew class cheder——’

‘Never mind!’ her husband interrupted her with a kiss as rare as her yielding and made himself comfortable in the rocking chair. He took up the paper and glanced at the pictures. ‘Tsorright!’ he added absently as he stretched his legs out to the warmth and tilted himself back as though to get out of range of his Sarah’s fit of amiability. But Sarah ignored his attempt at indifference and spoke again.

‘You know,’ she continued with ill-restrained pride. ‘Barnett, you know? Davy told me dinnertime, he’s going to skip into standerrd fife und onnly nine! Him und anodder boy, Ikey Levinson—two Yiddisher boys und dat’s all no more! isn’t dat good—no?’

At this Barnett put away his pose of indifference and rose to do himself justice.

‘Yes, my life. I alvays tolld you dat vone Yiddisher head is better already dan ten tousand odder people’s cabbage-heads—didn’t I tolld you—ha? Look at me! Eight yerrs in Aingland und already a master for mineself! Und I came here mitout a penny in my pocket—onnly fifty rubel to show de emigration officers! Und vhat is de vhy? De reason is ferrst’—in spite of his success in England his voice took to itself the old sing-song of Yiddish and Talmudic argument as practised in Pamunitzé— ‘—dat I vas a TAILor und not a SHOEmaker—und tzveitens dat I VORRKED und SAVED und VORRKED und SAVED, und vhen I ASKED for a RISE und de BOSS gimme de SACK, I said GoodBYEee—und opened a shop joost next door. Und all de FAT vones comm to me because I tell dem dey are getting TINNER und all de tin vones comm to me because I tell dem dey are getting fatter—und vice-shvartzé mit de long vones und versa still mid de short vones—und so I’m BOSS! a ladies’ und gents’ und clerical tailor all by mineself—a society man! Everybody I know—officers, lawyers, doctors, rabbis, Catolics, Protestants, Socialists, Qvakers, actors, actres—never mind, everybody! Und now,’ he concluded complacently reoccupying the rocking chair, ‘—now dat you know, my life, vot a clever hosband you vos lucky to catch, you might gimme a cup tea, no? Ha?’

Sarah had not heard this oration for the first time, and it left her quite cold. During the middle of it she had put tea in the pot; At ‘actors’ she was pouring the bubbling water on the leaves and narrowly escaped a scald; now she eyed him suspiciously.

‘Er Barnett! Vhere did you haf dinner—at de vegetarians—no?’

Barnett groaned and rolled his eyes, then spoke ingratiatingly.

‘No, my life. Business is business. De Catolic nephew of de missionary doctor down de road—from de dispensary hospital you know—’

Sarah was side-tracked. She paused in her suspicion to consider.

‘Oi! de vone vot vas nearly killed mit——’

‘Cabages, yes,’ concluded for her Barnett, and moralized: ‘Vonderrful ting—tzivilization! Vonce on a time if a man preached vot odder people didn’t like, he got stoned mit stones—und now he gets tomartyred mit cabbages! You know——’

But Sarah had already repented her deviation and was back again, strong on the scent of her suspicion.

‘Vhat,’ she sternly demanded, ‘did you haf for dinner? Bread und butter?’

‘I ask you, my life,’ pleaded the culprit. ‘Can a man live und do business mit Catolic priests und keep a vife und children und be a boss-a-master for himself—all on bread und butter, ha?’

But Sarah refused to be cajoled.

‘Barnett!’ she almost screamed. ‘You didn’t eat ham—pig?’

He did not stop to consider whether the last word was intended to be a synonym for the taboo or for himself, but responded with histrionic meditation,

‘No-o, I donnt tink it vas ham. I tink it vas mutton.’

‘Barnett—it vasn’t kosher!’ cried Sarah wildly.

‘Nu?’ queried Barnett petulantly while none could tell—not even his wife—whether it was his logic or his religion that was faulty. ‘Nu? Is it mine fault dat de priest vanted mutton—I ask you—ha? Could I say No to soch a costomerr—ha?’

Both of them, of course, were working themselves up into a scene. Such scenes are neither infrequent nor serious. They serve the double purpose of colouring life’s drabness and of accentuating the real love the Barnetts and Sarahs bear to and endeavour to conceal from one another.

‘Oi veh!’ wailed Sarah and wrung her hands. ‘Vhy did ve ever comm to soch a treifé land? Didn’t my fader tolld me Aingland vas a treifé mediné (non-kosher country). Vhat vould Reb Zalman say, you goy!’

Of course, Sarah was right and her father was right. In the old days in Pamunitzé there were no such temptations for the Barnetts of Jewry. There were no Gentile restaurants with their piggish display in that little Jewish hamlet near the Russo-Polish frontier. England was certainly ninety-nine and more per cent. treifé. Abounding with food unfit for Jewish consumption were England’s restaurants. An un-Jewish country. A land to be despised. Sarah possessed to the full that queer superiority complex found in all Jews but the assimilated. Into the latter creeps an equally queer inferiority complex that urges them to venerate all things and ideas non-Jewish. The more polished the Jew, the more he cringes. Barnett, though a proper ‘Ainglishman’ had not yet reached that stage of assimilation. Nevertheless his Sarah’s Pamunitzé provincialism exasperated him. Perhaps, too, he was not yet able to infringe a taboo of his folk without suffering pricks of conscience. Which but exasperated him still more. And then Reb Zalman’s refusal of his frequently proffered hospitality annoyed him; and the reference to the Rabbi’s disapproval provoked Barnett into a realler anger than he had yet indulged that evening.

‘Alvays,’ he upstarted. ‘Alvays vhen I comm home it’s dis odder dat! Alvays naggigging. Nag, nag und vidder nag! I tell you, Sarah, I vonnt stand it no more no! Do I ever interrfere mit anybody—ha? Mit you—ha? You vant to keep de house kosher all right—do I say No—ha? Aingland’s a free contré! Do I interrfere mit you und Davy—ha? Do I ask anyvone questions—dis—dat—ha? Do I ask Mr. Moses vhy he vas soch a fool as to t’row avay his chance for headmaster to be a—a Hebrew-master—ha? No! Do I interrfere mit anybody—ha? Do I go und tell de Catolic priest vhat a fool he vas to qvarrel mit his rich olld oncle about such nottings as vedder bread und vine is Christ’s flesh und blood—ha? Vhat’s it his benefit? Do I go und tell him vhat a fool he is to go avay just now vhen his oncle’s dying mit time yet to make his vill over—ha?—HA? No! Again NO! Vhat I say is, I say: Let everybody do vhat he likes s’long as he doesn’t do vhat he likes mit me! Den—oi, den I kick! Und vhen I kick I—kick—KICK! So—’ his rage vented, he resumed his seat like the Barnett he was and concluded mildly, ‘—so be a good voman und because you know I vouldn’t kick YOU, donnt go und take de advantage over y’ronn husband—ha?’

Sarah had the woman’s trick of containing and displaying quite a lot of contempt in just a snort. She snorted now as she poured out for herself first and then for Barnett.

‘You kick me! I’d break you legs und give dem in you hands to play mit!’ She put her hand on his cup. ‘If you donnt go und vash you hands, you donnt get no sopper! Enoff you eat witout a cap on—no?’

‘Oi, alleright!’ Barnett resigned, and the battle was over.

Though one may have a sneaking sympathy with the rebel against taboos yet must it be confessed that tabooism is the foundation of civilization. Murder and theft and other men’s wives are taboos. Antisocial acts on becoming formidable are labelled taboo, meaning dangerous. Jews, longer civilized and further-travelled than most nations, have perhaps more ancient, more original and more acquired taboos than other nations. Taboos of health and of behaviour and of race preservation. The bared head a taboo of the old sun-smitten lands where they first had their being; unwashed hands at meals an old taboo of health—and pig a taboo of all sensible meat-eaters. In process of time and wandering new taboos are assimilated and old taboos weaken and Sarahs wring their hands and Barnetts wriggle.

Their bright little Davy at that moment was in a tramcar puzzling his head over quite a modern taboo. After Hebrew class he had paid a visit to a non-Jewish schoolmate, Jimmy Bolton, to have just another go at a penny puzzle that had defied all their united efforts that day in school. His dallying with the puzzle had cost him his last half-penny to reach home without incurring any criticism. And in the tramcar he was worrying himself over the precise meaning of the taboo: SPITTING ON THE TRAMCAR IS FORBIDDEN. Did it mean that while riding on the open top (his favourite mode) he must not spit on to the street? That, too, would be spitting (while) on the tram. Or did it mean only that when he was in the street he must not spit on the tram?

Anyhow it was a taboo—and while Davy turned it round and round in his mind, he was being carried nearer home where his father, with his mouth full of rye bread and pickled herrings, was relating the workday’s events to his spouse, not yet long enough a sleeping partner to be indifferently interested in the details of the business.

‘But I nearly forgot to tell you,’ Barnett was saying as Davy swung off the tram and began to hop-and-skip home. ‘De missionary doctor’s Catolic nephew is comming soon to talk over sommtink. Ve vasn’t private enoff in de restaurant, und after dinner I vas too busy measurin’ him for his going-avay clo’s, und den Reb Zalman came in for a kosher overcoat und so——’

‘Oi veh!’ wailed anew Sarah. ‘Reb Zalman he never comms in my house for a shabbos-glass of tea like he used to in my fader’s house in Pamunitzé! Und you know vhy—you goy!’

‘Mine business!’ Barnett shrugged his shoulders. ‘He comms to my shop because he knows he can get from me a real kosher overcoat not mixed mit linen und vool, und because I gif him two-und-a-half pretzent discount for credit. Yes, so de priest he couldn’t tell me vhat he wrote——’

‘A nice ting you put togedder de good Reb Zalman, long may he live! mit a Catolic priest in vone breat’—no?’

‘Aie! Limmelonn! De priest he tolld me it vas to do mit you more dan mit me. Didn’t you get from him a letter mit explanations—ha? My vife should get letters from Catolic priests!’

‘Oi, a letter!’ replied Sarah with a sniff at the low joke and another in defence of her neglected education. ‘I got a letter. MRS. Cohen de posstman said. But it’s in Ainglish und you know I’m not an Ainglishman!’

Barnett was not slow in following up the advantage her admission always gave him.

‘Yes,’ he agreed in irritating triumph. ‘Yes, I know. I alvays tolld you, vhen you came over, to go to night-school, didn’t I tolld you—ha? You vas shameful und you still a greener. But look at me und take de example! I write und spik Ainglish jost like a proper Ainglishman—no—ha? You vill see. I—ME—vill read you de letter!’

Lucky, however, for Barnett that his son was hurrying unconsciously to his aid. Sarah’s silence as she handed him the letter was a tacit acknowledgment of her exposed vulnerability. Barnett opened out the letter, donned his eye-glasses with dignity and frowned.

‘Nu,’ demanded his spouse, scenting an opening to retrieve her defeat. ‘Vhy donnt you read it?’

Barnett played for time.

‘Vait a minute. Donnt be in soch a horry! It must be studied proper. High-class writing cannt be made out so easy as de ordinary. Yes . . . dat’s right. . . . Dear mad—mad——’

‘Vot?’

‘Vait, I haven’t findished. Dear mad—mad—Madam—yes, dat’s right.’ He looked up and caught her agnostic glance and looked down and relied on his wits and plunged. ‘I vas writing you dese few lines hoping to find you in de best of healt’ same as it leaves me at present. Tzveitens (secondly)——’

‘Barnett!’ screamed Sarah in withering scorn. ‘De missionary’s Catolic nephew he write like dat?’

‘Vell,’ countered Barnett, ‘vhy not—ha? Many letters you get from Catolic priests—ha?’

‘You make it out of y’ronn head, isn’t it no, Barnett? Gorn! Donnt you know yet dat no man can bloff his own vife? You shvindler you! You nypocrite you! You—’

But here a wild, impatient kicking and clattering at the street door heralded the new generation. Davy was come to his father’s aid. Cohen pushed the letter from him saying:

‘Vot you bodder me mit you letters from Catolic priests vhen you got soch a clever son—ha?’

In contemptuous silence Sarah hurried to save her son’s boots, her landlord’s door and her baby’s sleep, leaving Barnett crying to the gaslight:

‘Oi, de vomen! Oi de vomen!’

And now the next generation burst in in the shape of a healthy, naughty, red-cheeked youngster, cap at the back of tousled hair, hands and arms awaving and voice ashrilling:

‘Hullo, father! Father, gimme penny please want to buy puzzle same as Jimmy Bolton’s got an’ I bet you father yer dont find the trick half as quick as me!’

From the street door came Sarah’s voice in expostulation with the butcher’s boy.

‘Davy,’ whispered his father furtively. ‘Comm here. I gif you de penny if you read me dis qvickly,’ and he thrust the priest’s letter under the lad’s nose.

‘That’s nowt,’ accepted Davy the commission with the glorious cocksureness of youth. He grasped the missive and began to hum.

‘Dear Madam—um—um—um——.’

‘Nu?’ impatiently prompted the elder with one ear to the street door. ‘I could make out dat mineself und I not skipped into standard fife! Gorn!’

‘Don’t be in such a blessed hurry, father!’ avenged the child his mother. ‘It’s rotten writing, anyway, and it’s only about a rotten little girl from that Darrel man! Father, does he have to turn round himself every time he buttons his collar?’

From the street door came the parting of the butcher boy.

‘Hush!’ whispered frantically Barnett. ‘Here’s de penny for de puzzler!’ Then, in a louder voice as he snatched the letter back and set himself to study it anew, ‘Gorn, you derrty boy! Gorn vash youself—ha!’

Sarah, re-entering with the Sabbath fowl, found her husband in solitary labour over the priest’s communication.

‘You know, my life,’ he genially greeted her. ‘You know vot de letter says? It took me a long time to make out—de ink’s a bit rubbed off—sommtink about a little gell!’

‘A little gell? You not make dat out of y’ronn head as vell—no?’

‘Gorn,’ protested the scholar. ‘Call me a liar straight, vhy donnt you—ha?’

‘Vhy should I tell you? Donnt you know it? You a tailor—no?’ and then laid down the law. ‘Vhen de priest he wants YOU, he comms to YOU. Vhen he vants ME, he can comm to ME—mitout letterrs!——Davy! Vhat you doing in de scollery?’

‘Want t’eat, Mammy!’ sang out the shrill treble. ‘I’m only washing my hands!’

‘Dat’s right,’ approved his mother as she placed the wrapped up hen on the sideboard. ‘Dat’s a good boy. Alvays do vhat you Hebrew-master, Mr. Moses, he tell you, und he’ll make a great Jew from you vone day!’ and, as Davy, his cap still at the back of his hair, took his seat at the table—‘Yes, de Master he tolld me vonce after a Zionist meeting—he said: “Who knows? Praps you Davy is de leader ve Jews are looking for—or any of de children in my cheder—no?” ’

At this, Davy mischievously bethought himself. Soaked to his young marrow with the influence of Moses, he entangled his duteous filial love and respect with no misconceptions as to his father’s backslidings in the practices of the faith he was taught at the Hebrew class.

‘Father,’ he remarked with casual placidity. ‘The master says we should eat with caps on and keep all our other Jewish customs because till we get back to Palestine, it’s only our customs that keep us Jews together. Father, why don’t you wear a nice black silk cap like the master?’

His father buried his head in the paper and left Sarah to defend him.

‘Davy,’ responded his mother to Barnett’s unvoiced appeal, ‘—get along mit you sopper! Donnt you know qvite vell dat you fader’s a bit veak in de head und must have fresh ’air—no?’ Did she miss the aspirate intentionally?

‘Sarah!’ exclaimed Barnett in indignant protest.

‘Vell?’ said Sarah phlegmatically. Barnett wavered under his wife’s steady stare and sighed:

‘Nottink.’

Davy, his mouth full, began again:

‘Father, the master said we mustn’t work on shabbos. Why don’t you keep the shop closed on Saturdays and go with me to the synagogue?’

This time there could be no retreat. Barnett turned and faced his son and spoke in tones of vindictive deliberation:

‘Davy, you can tell you Hebrew-master dat if he interrferes mit me und my business—I donnt like it. Tell him dat if anyone interferes mit me und my business, dat I—kick! Und dat vhen I kick I—KICK!—ha?’

‘Father,’ an excited little boy interrupted him. ‘I bet the penny you just gave me for reading that letter that the Master can fight you!’

‘Shot op! Qviet! Shveig—you—you—you—YOU!’

‘Davy,’ commanded Sarah with a significant side-glance. ‘Go out until you can behave youself!’

‘All right!’ concurred the sinner as he jauntily crossed the room. ‘I’m going to buy a puzzle same as Jimmy Bolton’s got. And I never do care much for pickled herring anyway.’ At the door he recollected. ‘O father, the Master said he was coming over for a talk with you to-night.’ And a Parthian shot: ‘I wouldn’t like to be you, father!’

Every married man becomes a tactician. As soon as Davy was quite gone, Barnett set himself to side-track the unfortunate disclosure. He took the method of vilifying the country of his adoption.

‘Sarah,’ he admitted with a sigh, and took up the picture page in the evening paper. ‘Sarah, yu right. Aingland’s a treifé land vhere children haf no respect nit for fader-mudder.’

But his wife was resentful that she had been compelled to scold her darling Davy.

‘Vell, vhat you vant? Vhat you ’xpect mit soch a goy for a fader? His Master tells him right und his fader shows him all wrong—no?’

For his own self-respect Barnett had to get a bit of his own back on this Mr. Moses.

‘If he soch a good teacher, den vhy didn’t he better teach his onn Rachel not to go avay mit missionaries—ha?’

‘Donnt talk to me,’ parried Sarah. ‘You know vhat I been tinking? A great pity you onnly had vone fader-mudder!’

‘Sarah, you meshuggé!’

‘No,’ she denied. ‘ME not mad! No. Yes, vhen you fader died you vent to shool und said you prayers und kaddish und vas religious for a whole yerr. Vhen you mudder died you also vent to synagogue and said you prayers reg’ly und kaddish for her soul for anodder yerr. A great pity, Barnett, you got no more fader-mudders—no? Barnett, my life! Couldn’t you find an oncle or sombody to die?’

It is just possible that the married reader, male, will understand that Barnett had about had enough of this harping on what was to him a touchy subject.

‘Sarah,’ he countered desperately. ‘You donnt know vhat you saying! P’raps you vould like me to be religious und go to Synagogue and say kaddish anodder whole yerr—for BABY!?—ha?’

‘Oi!’ With the startled cry Sarah rushed to the cradle to protect little Leah from the unluck of the unfortunate retort. ‘Barnett! Barnett! Oi! Vhat did you say!? Mine baby! Mine baby!’ Here she spat out to avert the evil. ‘No, no! Not on you, mammilé mine! Not on you, mine kind! On de goyyim, (non-Jews)! On de goyyim!’

She spits out again and stoops protectingly over the sleeping child while Barnett shrugs his shoulders, turns up his eyes and meditates an apostrophe to the gaslight, when the street door is heard to dash open.

Barnett welcomed the interruption and smiled at Davy’s shrilling.

‘Father’s in the kitchen, Mr. Darrel. Walk right in. I’ve just bought a puzzle same as Jimmy Bolton’s got. Is it about that rotten little girl, Mr. Darrel? Tell father I’m upstairs if he can’t live without me. Walk right in.’

5. IGNATIUS DARREL

Since one red night some more than seven years back, Ignatius Darrel’s life had been anywhere but on the level plains—high up, up on the cold peaks of religious ultra-icy logic or down, down, deep in the hell-pits of undying remorse. But only the average showed upon his face, only the level plains. And they held their place only by the iron will of the still young ascetic. Darrel was a priest of the Holy Catholic Church of Rome. Even before that red night whose memory would forever sear his sleep, his gift for deliberate logic had jibbed at the compromise of Protestantism. In his uncle’s house he had met many of the latter’s colleagues, parsons of every shade of Protestant opinion, from Anglo-Catholics to Unitarians, and failed to find in any of them the absolute intellectual sincerity his brain demanded. To his uncle Christianity was Christianity, with few, if any, analysable properties. Jesus Christ died for all men’s sins. All who believed in Jesus Christ entered Heaven and sat upon the Redeemer’s right hand. He believed Jesus Christ to be the one begotten Son of God. And yet his Christianity could remain undisturbed even if this human divinity were proven a fable. Christ mattered to the older Darrel very little in comparison with Christianity. Christianity, in fact, might even drop Christ—as it, in fact, was doing—and could still go on. For this was the attitude of many of the parsons who visited the Darrel mission, and the uncle tolerated them, considered them Christians. When some of them denied the Virgin birth, young Darrel taxed them fiercely with hypocrisy and betrayal. They laughed at his fanaticism, and his uncle reproved him for his intolerance. Even in those days, young Darrel would rage, crying to these compromisers: ‘Either you believe that Jesus was the actual Son of God offered by the Father to Himself as an atonement for mankind wherewith it might, by faith, redeem itself from the sin of the Fall, either that or—out of the Church!’ The others laughed at him good-naturedly, assured him that the actual divinity of Jesus was of no consequence. Even if he were only the ideal man, it was sufficient to make Christianity the sole expression of Man’s outreaching for the highest. Even if Jesus were not the Christ, then was Christianity the Christ and Saviour of mankind.

These people worried him. Even more worried him the Anglo-Catholics. If they could swallow Jesus incarnate in bread and wine, surely they could digest Jesus spiritually in the Roman Church!

Long before that red night young Darrel, having an income of his own, had privately decided to travel to Rome there to discover whether Christianity was a religion or a fake. The red night flamed on the eve of his journey, from which he returned some seven months later ostensibly to see his uncle before his own entry into the Roman Catholic priesthood, but really, as he admitted to himself on the station platform, to catch a farewell glimpse of the girl who for one hour had possessed the power to reduce him to a mere male. Of his learning that she had left home—of his frantic reckoning of days—of his frenzied hunt—of the tragedy of the hunt’s finale—he never dared think in daylight. The level plains covered the peaks and valleys; and it was a calm-faced young priest, with a portly bearing that added dignity to a tall figure, and a handsome, grave, earnest, clean-shaven countenance, that knocked at the Cohens’ kitchen door.

‘Comm on in, comm on in, Mr. Reverend Darrel,’ cried Barnett, opening the door, shaking him by the hand and pulling him fussily inside. ‘Donnt mind de kitchen—ha? More homelike dan de parlour. De parlour is onnly for gentlemen, not friends like. Sit down, sit down!’ and he took the other’s hat and put it on the sideboard and then pressed its owner into a chair. Darrel smiled:

‘And how is Mrs. Cohen?’

‘Middling, jost middling,’ returned Sarah from the cradle, not without another furtive spit and a still angry side-look at Barnett who took up the paper to shield himself the whilst he danced his fingers deprecatingly.

‘And Little Leah?’ mildly persevered Darrel.

‘Lovely, kein ein horo’ (no evil eye)!’ And now Sarah returned the compliment of curiosity.

‘Und how’s your oncle?’

Darrel at once became grave and unsmiling. His uncle had ventured into the vegetable market for once, and that once was once too much. A burly Yorkshire yokel had started the jeering, and a badly thrown cabbage (the thrower had meant to miss) had finished the gospel-bringing and was now finishing the gospel-bringer. Dr. Darrel at that moment lay a-dying, and only that afternoon had his nephew made a last attempt to convince the dying man that it was even more important for the salvation of his immortal soul to believe in the infallibility of a living Pope than in the mere divinity of a dead Jew. For in the last few years had young Darrel not only become a great believer, but also a great missionary for his Church. His preaching had aroused enormous interest, his converts came from the highest of England’s ranks, and his superiors had marked him for comparatively speedy advancement. He was even now on the eve of an overseas mission which, if successful, would set him on the road to become one of the princes of the Church. With a start he awoke to Sarah’s polite question:

‘Very near to his Maker, I fear!’

Unconsciously the stress came under the word ‘fear.’ He did fear for his uncle’s soul. Feared as his uncle had feared for the souls of his Jewish ‘parishioners.’ Barnett, a Jew, could not quite understand the stress he sensed under that ‘fear.’ The Jew worries little over the after-life—considering it as God’s business more than his own.

‘Vell,’ Barnett tried to joke the riddle away. ‘Vhat you ’fraid for? He vas vell off—no—ha? Und you de onnly relation—ha?’

Sarah did her best at consolation with the dish of second-best fruit.

‘Donnt listen to him, Reverend Darrel. He got no feeling. Have an orange—no? Aie! Vhy didn’t your oncle stick to de Jews? Ve took no notice off him! Und soch nice openings he gave!’

‘Yes,’ supplemented Barnett. ‘A gentleman like your oncle should go und haf to do mit market yoks! Und me, I lovved to hear your oncle—ahh!’ And he sighed regretfully at the looming bereavement. Sarah stared at him. ‘Vot?’ and Darrel, the priest rising uppermost:

‘I am happy to learn that the Gospel has touched you, my friend.’

‘Not exactly,’ apologized Barnett. ‘You see, I’m very fond of music und your oncle’s chvoir vas de best of all de missionaries. I’m sure if your oncle had onnly not left his chvoir behind him he vouldn’t haf met mit soch a unfortunate accident. A great pity!—ha?’

The priest perhaps was disappointed. Sarah, reassured, took up her parcel from the sideboard and excused herself before she disappeared into the scullery.

‘ ’Xcuse me. I must see vhat kind of a hen dat butcher he sent me for shabbos!’ And she left the gentlemen to themselves.

Barnett relaxed. Darrel brooded. Was he really doing wisely? The other day in Barnett’s tailoring establishment he had encountered Reb Zalman for the first time. At the moment he was perturbed. The child’s foster-mother had died the day before, and his departure took up so much of his time that he was afraid he would be unable to find another to his liking. He had already arranged to place the infant in a convent—one, as it happened, in the East End. Nevertheless he would have liked to leave someone more personal than the impersonal sisterhood to have a kind of guardianship over the little one. And just then this Reb Zalman had looked into his eyes as if he had read all his thoughts and was ready with a solution. Absurd, of course, but when the Rabbi had looked from him straight to Barnett, the idea had stuck. A grim kind of poetic justice. He had talked the matter over with Barnett whose humour was tickled at the offer of a joint guardianship that might bring him into contact with more lawyers and priests and so increase his clientele. Remained Sarah.

Barnett coughed politely as he unbuttoned with furtive fingers the top button of his trousers.

‘Ahem! If you vasn’t a clergyman I vould haf had much pleasure in giving you free overveight on your orrderr, a real fashionable mourning suit in advance. Onnly—I donnt know vhy—you clerrgymen are alvays in mourning for sommtink—ha?’

‘Mourning,’ Darrel ponderously rejoined, ‘for the moral decease of the world, my friend.’

The other’s English was more practical than ornamental; but his trade had given him the word ‘deceased’ and his clerical clients had taught him ‘morality,’ so he fenced.

‘Oi! den you clo’s are—de same as you oncle’s fav’rite medicine—ha? A black draught to clear de vo’ld’s stommach from sin—ha? Vell, Aingland’s a free contré! Vhat I say is: Let everyvone do vhat he likes so long as he donnt try to do vhat he likes mit me. Den I KICK! Und ven I——’

From the scullery Sarah re-entered, never losing an opportunity to bring to untimely conclusion her husband’s slogan.

‘Barnett,’ she interrupted, the butcher’s parcel in her hand, a frown on her brow and her macintosh over her arm. ‘Hold you mout’! Cannt you see Mr. Reverend Darrel vants to talk about his letter of a little gell und not to listen to you meshugassen (idiocies)—no?’

Darrel was not ungrateful for Sarah’s opening that enabled him to pass Barnett’s aperient.

‘Thank you, Mrs. Cohen. I am always interested in Mr. Cohen’s opinions but, to-night, it IS about something special that I have come to see YOU, Mrs. Cohen.’

Barnett, seeing the butcher’s parcel in his wife’s hands, vainly endeavoured to get a danger signal over to the priest, but the latter had his eyes on the lady who replied with a sniff in her husband’s direction.

‘Yes, mine hosband, he read you letter to me. He reads like a proper Ainglishman. Ye-es.’

Darrel, however, had known the Cohens some time, and had ere this penetrated to the kindliness and loyalty under the surface cynicism and bickering of the couple. He had made all his preparations without contemplating a possible refusal from Sarah. Yet now, before plunging into the formality of obtaining her consent, he felt unaccountably nervous. It was strange, unanticipated. He referred nervously to his watch.

‘You see, I am preparing to-night for my immediate journey to Africa. A hurried appointment——’

‘ ’Xcuse me asking,’ apologized Sarah politely. ‘For vhy Africa?’ Darrel smiled gravely. His humour was of the heavy sort, tough and lasting—like our Jewish troubles.

‘To bring light to the heathen,’ he replied.

‘Oi!’ thought Barnett aloud. ‘Same as your oncle in Vhitechapel—ha? Vell, take mine advice und donnt forget de chvoir!’

‘Ah, Mr. Cohen,’ expostulated Darrel for his church. ‘I believe I understand your point of view, though I believe still more that you are greatly and deeply in the dark.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Barnett genially. ‘Like de Africaner—ha?’

‘Donnt listen to him,’ advised Sarah. ‘He got no feelin’. Have an orange—no? You vant sommtink from us ’bout a little gell p’raps—no?’

To his surprise Darrel found himself quite agitated. He bent forward to conceal his emotion and plunged.

‘Er, yes. You see—I am—er—guardian to a child that was left in my care by a—a dear friend. One of life’s most pitiful tragedies—Nature snared them—trapped them before they were aware. And this—this child—is the—er—er——’

For the life of him he could not help stuttering, nor did Sarah, as he stumbled for words, make it any easier for him.

‘Vhy,’ she demanded sharply. ‘Vhy didn’t he marry her?’

Darrel was startled into truth.

‘He—never knew until—until it was too—too late!’ He started forward. ‘She—she was—dead.’

‘Oi!’ sympathized Sarah. ‘Und how olld is de chil’?’

Darrel’s mind flew back and counted the years and the days. He passed his hand over his forehead and, still staring forward, fell into the trap.

‘Seven,’ he replied. ‘Seven—come May the—twenty-third.’

‘Oi!’ Sarah sighed. ‘Comm May de tventy-terrd! Und de fader?’

She regarded him keenly as, with an effort, he brought himself back to the lie in hand.

‘He is dead.’

‘Dat’s all right,’ decided Barnett, rubbing his hands.

‘Barnett!’ scolded his wife and turned again to Darrel.

‘ ’Xcuse me! Vhy you bring de chil’ to us? Isn’t dere plenty of y’ronn dat vould——’

Now Darrel couldn’t very well tell them about that absurdity of the old East End Rabbi’s look; though, if he had so told them, they would have expressed no surprise, and his desires would have found an easy fulfilment. Instead, he began to talk rapidly and nervously, with a kind of desperate determination.

‘I don’t feel I know exactly my—I mean, I don’t exactly mean you should take her in—here! Only just to sort of keep an eye on the child. It’s such a delicate matter—I—I don’t know exactly how to explain myself. You see—I don’t quite like the idea of leaving her in the hands of—how shall I explain? You understand the unhappy origin of the child—I don’t want her to grow up with any suspicion of the truth—I would like to leave her the charge—quite nominal, I assure you—of someone whom I could trust to—er—to——’

Barnett concluded for him.

‘—tell lies better dan a Christian—ha?’

But Darrel was in no humour for Barnett’s. He pleaded almost; and could hardly brook Sarah’s ‘Barnett!’ and Barnett’s ‘Vell, ain’t I a tailor—ha?’ before he continued.

‘She’ll be no trouble to you at all, Mrs. Cohen. During my absence from England Mr. Cohen will take my place as guardian—no more than that. I’ve provided for her for many years—many more years than I am likely to be away. And if anything happens to me, she is quite secured. She is already entered in the convent not far off, and—who can tell? She might one day need a real mother’s care, and—and I was brought up in the East End, and I know how good Jewish mothers always are to children. I do hope——’

His words trailed into silence.

‘Vell, Sarah,’ prompted Barnett. ‘Vot you say—ha?’

Before she replied, Sarah slipped into her mac.

‘Gorn, Mr. Reverend Darrel,’ she offered her hospitality. ‘Gorn! Vhy donn’t you haf sommtink—no? ’Xcuse me. I got to take dis hen to Reb Zalman. Vhen I opened it,’ she explained as to an ignorant Gentile, ‘I found a pin in it, und I must run and show it to Reb Zalman in de Shtiebel, he should tell me if ve can eat it, if it’s kosher, you onderstand. Have an orange, gorn! und I’ll tink you over on de vay.’ And after she had bustled out of the kitchen, the street door opened and closed as with deliberate care. Quite remarkable how menfolk through all the grades of society seem to relax when relieved of feminine society. Woman’s presence exercises a restraint—not necessarily moral, certainly not intellectual. One never knows when she might be tempted to set right a kink in one’s tie or one’s character. Even Darrel relaxed in his chair and, as for Barnett, he unbuttoned the lowest button of his waistcoat. Barnett enjoyed every respite his wife gave him. Until recently, when home and workshop had been judiciously separated, he had hardly ever been apart from his Sarah, whose sound advice and practical assistance in felling and buttonholing had been of no little value during this first part of his ascent. The couple had worked upon one another, moulded and influenced one the other, chaffed and quarrelled and bickered together and loved one another with the restrained, reserved, almost secret love of Jewish family life. From this concealed-love point of view, the homeless shop had at first been felt as a lamentable experiment, but it had turned out successful, though rather lonely for Sarah till the coming of little Leah. Barnett enjoyed his successful rivalry with his quondam master, felt himself henceforth the real, sole breadwinner—a master tailor. He had suggested a servant for Sarah, but as yet she scorned the idea. She was no cripple, she averred. The expense of a servant she saved and hoarded for a rainy day. She scrubbed and stitched and knitted. Her husband’s socks were her pride and his despair; he longed for the patterns of Commercial Street. In fact, he was ripening for the next stage in the evolution of his like from the Lane to Hampstead, but as yet Sarah had not shown any corresponding ambition.

The idea of becoming guardian to a priest’s bastard tickled Cohen the Jew. And then there was the possibility his keen business instinct had envisaged of additional professional customers. For himself, Barnett was content to put the priest under an obligation, but Sarah was an unknown quantity.

‘Nu, Mr. Reverend Darrel,’ began Barnett, as he stretched his legs. ‘Have sommtink—no? All right. Let’s comm to business—ha? Vell—’ and his voice fell into the traditional argumentative sing-song of Pamunitzé days. ‘If my vife says Yes, den it’s Yes! und if my Sarah says No, den it’s No! Und let ME tell YOU, if you vant my vife should say Yes, den pray as harrd as you ever lerrned dat de hen’s stomach’s alleright!’

‘Not that,’ answered the other as if quoting. ‘Not that which ENTERETH into man is unclean, Mr. Cohen.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Barnett, who never was more dangerous in repartee than when he agreed. ‘Dat’s not vhat de doctors say. Dat’s Christianity. De hen, if it’s no good, if it’s treifé, is also de same, so ve give it avay to de Christians—ha?’

‘Mr. Cohen!’ protested Darrel, his delicacy more than his faith offended. For his faith there was no offence as there was no defence. Faith was that which, he had long ago decided, could not logically be defended. Otherwise it were not faith, but fact, and no fact could be great enough to be a religion.

‘No, I—I—donnt say dat,’ apologized Barnett for his rudeness. ‘It vas Davy’s Hebrew-master said vonce in a Zionist speech. He said——’

But Darrel was not interested in Davy’s Hebrew-master, though, of course, he was well aware of the tribe of pedants and pedagogues that after school hours sweated young Jewry and stubborned their little hearts against the Blessed Word and Life—but otherwise—

‘Ah, well, Mr. Cohen, with all due respect to Davy’s Hebrew-master, we are concerned with other matters at present. Of course, it is understood, that I treat this in strict business fashion—in advance,’ and here he put his hand in his breast-pocket.

‘Of course,’ agreed Barnett, waving the chequebook back. ‘But I donnt know vhat to charge you yet. Und den, vhat you know vhat my Sarah’ll say? You onnly a priest—not a prophet! If my vife says Yes, den ve can—never mind—vait till you comm back.’

‘No, no, Mr. Cohen,’ insisted the other.

‘Vhat’s my benefit?’ argued Barnett. ‘I mightn’t charge you enoff!’ Here Barnett bettered a scene in the current Yiddish play at the Whitechapel Pavilion. He took out some tobacco that was contained loose in a waistcoat pocket, and, stripping a cigarette paper from a packet produced from the same source, rolled himself a cigarette. He knew Darrel did not smoke, so he wasted no politeness over him; struck a match deliberately, as he had seen the great actor do—on his boot—and lit his endy fag. Slowly blew out the match, and then threw it into the fire. Leaned back and puffed for a few seconds, then remarked casually:

‘Mr. Reverend Darrel, you tink my Sarah hasn’t guessed?’

‘??!!??!’ It was a white-faced and startled Darrel that queried the amateur actor with eyebrows, eyes, lips and complexion.

‘Oi, nottink,’ assured him Barnett. ‘Onnly you could do mit a little more practice. You should go in de tailorin’ line—’ A knock at the street door broke in upon the advice of Barnett and gave Darrel an opportunity to recover himself. The level plains resumed their surface sway, but peaks and valleys would yet be hard put that evening not to betray themselves.

6. FATE TO FATE

Between the two generations the battle joined issue.

‘Davy!’ called the father loudly from the fireside.

‘Ye-e-e-e-e-e-es?’ sang the shrill treble of the son from upstairs.

‘I’ll gif you Ye-e-es!’ shouted the older generation. ‘Vhy donnt you go at vonce und open de door—ah?’

‘In a minute, father!’ procrastinated the younger generation, absorbed in its own problems. ‘I’ve nearly finished finding out that puzzle same as Jimmy Bolton’s got, father!’

Youth’s problems ignore all bars—even those ’twixt Jew and Gentile. Barnett grew apoplectic.

‘I’ll gif you Jimmy Boltons! I’ll gif you puzzlers. Davy-y-y-y-y!’

‘In a minute, father! Won’t be long!’

The older generation made use of its acquired cunning, and tricked the younger with its ideals.

‘Davy, I think it’s de Master!’

Followed a noise as of a miniature tornado, succeeded by the opening and shutting of the street door. In a moment two men met fate to fate.

‘Good evening, Mr. Moses. Good evening. Good evening. Comm right in. Sit right down. Here in de rocking chair. Davy, take de Master’s coat and stick und hang dem up properly on de hat-stand. Gorn!’

To these articles Moses added his soft black hat, and in its stead donned the black skull-cap of the ultra Jewish orthodox. Davy returned speedily, and from the cradle corner hero-worshipped his Hebrew-teacher who, after a questioning look at the priest, was turning to Barnett for the necessary introduction. Darrel seemed unwell. His face paled, for the second time that evening, at the name of the master, and his fingers twined in a devil’s embrace. But only for a fraction of a second did the valleys peep out from under the momentarily relaxed curtain of the level plains. Barnett fulfilled his obligation as host with some surprise.

‘You never met de Reverend Fader Darrel, Mr. Moses?’

The teacher, with a sudden smile that gave a treacherous look of youth to his somewhat greying features, held out his hand.

‘NOT Dr. Darrel’s nephew?’

The other rose and took the proffered hand in an honest English grip as though he had not some seven years ago seduced his daughter.

‘Guilty, Mr. Moses. Guilty,’ he dared.

Moses had long since realized the bias in his heart against the missionary and all his ways. But the hard justice of his make-up always drove him to offset this personal prejudice by an impersonal admiration of the devotion of Dr. Darrel to his cause. He could not help admiring in the missionary’s very dying the perfect rounding off of an altogether complete life. And from the same justice in his make-up he responded all the more cordially to the nephew’s handclasp in order to offset the instinctive hatred that was ever ready to blaze up within him at the sight of aught owning the power to stir to flame the embers of his smouldering memories.

‘Delighted to meet you, Mr. Darrel. You need no better reference than the guilt of such connexion. And I hope that though you belong to a different sect you nevertheless take after your uncle.’ He scanned the face before him as he uttered his greeting with a slight remnant of a stammer that defies literary reproduction. ‘But I see you do. You have the face of a missionary; and the missionary trade—no matter the mission—is the finest under God.’ He unclasped and seated himself.

‘Vhat’s dat?’ queried Barnett, surprised.

‘Ah, Cohen, one must never confuse the work with the workman. The sword and scythe may both be made the same way. Mr. Darrel, I often chanced across your uncle in his labours and learned to admire him.’

Barnett shrugged his shoulders and silently appealed to the gaslight. Darrel was intrigued. He could not make out the other’s complex.

‘YOU?’ he exclaimed amazed. ‘You admire my uncle?’ and his amazement betrayed his knowledge of the other’s tragedy. Moses sensed the protest at his apparent abnormality. With hard honesty he explained.

‘Why not? The fact—fairly public—that some unknown disciple—or alleged disciple—of your uncle caused me some—er—inconvenience several years back must not be imagined capable at this late time of blinding my critical faculties, my appreciation of his way of life. The real Jew and the real Christian—perhaps I might say you and I—have much in common. We are both missionaries. The Jew the missionary direct of God—and the Christian the direct missionary of a Jew.

‘Yes?’ the priest began to unveil himself. ‘Do you still believe in the Jewish mission? Are you still the missionaries of your faith to the world?’

‘No,’ denied the other. ‘—to ourselves. The world must educate itself; we can only instruct it. But the virtue of missionary work lies not in the number of converts, but in the strength the missionary himself derives from his own iteration. We Jews have instructed the world, but we have educated—are still educating—ourselves. We have so far educated ourselves that we are now convinced of the reality of Isaiah’s messianic ploughshare and pruning hook.’

Poor Barnett, utterly at a loss, sought for refuge in the picture page of the evening paper. Darrel stood up manfully for his Christ.

‘The gospel of peace HAS been given.’

‘With what results—though a Jew gave it? No. Only a nation can give peace to the nations. A nation that has experienced the bitter truth that he who rises by the sword must fall by the sword. Such a nation must have lived and died and lived again, risen from the grave to preach the perfect national life. No other nation but the Jews has lived to profit by its own death. We died—nearly two thousand years ago. All those long years we have been crucified by the world. We now are ready to rise again to life in order to preach to the nations the peace divine.’

‘The Church is the preacher of the peace divine.’

‘With what results? Who is guiltier—we who, in olden time, slew in hate, or you, Christian nations all, who slay in love? For surely you love your enemies! With what results, I ask again. The Church has had a long, too long probation, and—failed! But I was not quite correct. Peace—international peace—cannot be preached. It must be lived—by a nation actually——’

‘As to that—agreed,’ evoked Darrel the final modern objection to the common sense of disarmament. ‘But are not the nations all too cowardly to lead the way? Which of the nations can you name brave enough to dare peace?’

The other loosened the brake on his passion.

‘WE! We Jews. Nearly two thousand years swordless! WE lead the way!’

‘But I said “nation,” ’ objected Darrel. ‘A religious group I grant you are, a community, a racial fraternity what you like. But a nation——?’

‘Is the child wrenched away from its mother,’ the Hebrew fanatic retorted, ‘—no longer a child?’

A close argument is the most dramatic thing in the world. Brains and souls more vital than bodies and bullets. And here two brain-souls grappled together. Darrel compressed his inhibitions and strove for the very life of his argument. Nothing too dear but must be dragged into alliance. A shrewd blow, and none to tell it was other than chance-dealt. He dealt it.

‘Your Rachel that left you—forgive me if I am indiscreet, but, as you say, it is public property—your own Rachel—isn’t it a fact that you cast her off—to die, perhaps, in sickness—in poverty—in shame—why? Was she no longer your child—why?’

The blow struck shrewdly home. Moses paled. Barnett’s pose of indifference sank with the evening paper, and in its place rose the surging curiosity to learn how the Hebrew-master would play back the stroke. In his eyes Moses unveiled the bigot’s glitter. His voice was dry, his stammer more perceptible.

‘Your analogy, I regret to say, is incorrect. This Rachel of whom you are pleased to speak, of her own free will left her father’s house and her race and her faith to follow the lust of her flesh. She slew her Jewish soul. Then was her body but a corpse that some Gentile dragged after him.’

Measure for measure. As Darrel in secret had wounded, so now in secret was he being wounded. The words stabbed and stabbed, and the priest’s heart behind the steady British surface bled and bled.

‘She was dead,’ continued Moses in arid tones. ‘No longer a child. No longer Jewish. But the Jewish nation UNwillingly was torn from its soil, and the Jewish nation has never surrendered or slain its Jewish soul. We are’—he smiled at last—‘the incarnation of the Trinity, the only trinity that could make a nation suffer and die as we have suffered and died—and yet quiver with life!’

‘The eternal Jewish problem!’ Darrel quoted.

‘And its solution,’ Moses affirmed. ‘Race, religion, nationality—the triple, not easily broken strand that shall yet draw back the child people to its motherland.’

‘And there and then, if the miracle happened,’ quietly and obstinately argued the other, ‘you would prove as idyllic as you once were—as idyllic as those little Balkan-peoples that serve to keep the Powers preoccupied!’

The touchstone this of the master’s philosophic and political make-up. Moses was not a material or geographical Zionist. Moses believed in the ultimate catholicity of the Jewish Church. Judaism, the world-religion, its church the whole earth, Israel its Minister. An opening here to declare his faith.

‘From Palestine as a pulpit shall we call upon the nations to fling away like yesterday’s toys their profane idolatries of national egoisms. They shall at last make one band to do the will of the one King—God—Who shall at last come into His own as the universally acknowledged King of the World. A united mankind can do with no lesser king than God. And from Zion the Law shall go forth—a Law built on the foundations of the old, by then, instinctive in humanity—a new Law, whose bible shall be——’

‘Gorn, have an orange—ha?’ Barnett at last managed to break his own silence, and hurled the teacher back from the cloud tops to his physical insignificance. Darrel laughed kindly.

‘A good peroration spoiled, Mr. Cohen. But, be reasonable, Mr. Moses. The whole trend of modernism proves your enthusiasm mistaken. Assimilation——’

‘Here, Davy!’ called the teacher, and the pupil—who had lost no word of the argument, albeit without utter comprehension—started up with the puzzle in his hand.

‘What are you?’ catechized Moses.

‘A Jew,’ replied David at attention.

‘Your ancestors?’

‘Jews.’

‘And when you marry one day your wife will be——?’

‘A Jewess.’

‘And your children——?’

‘Jews.’

‘Where have you come from?’

‘Palestine.’

‘Where are you going to?’

‘Palestine.’

‘What is a non-Jew?’

‘A goy!’

‘A non-Jewess?’

‘A shikseh!’ The contempt in the lad’s voice drove Barnett to protest for his priest-guest.

‘Davy, donnt be cheeky!’

‘O!’ remarked Darrel with Christian toleration, ‘It’s not the child’s fault.’ Davy smiled and retreated to his corner. ‘As I know, my uncle himself had to encounter a great deal of this traditional stiff-neckedness. The very women that came for treatment into his dispensary——’

‘Yes,’ admitted Moses in a tired voice. ‘Once you were fishers of men—now of women and children. Once it was loaves and fishes—now it’s sennapods and epsom salts. God! When all Christendom needs converting, that so much energy and fool-money should be spent in bribing ailing women and helpless children!’

‘I protest!’ exclaimed the priest.

‘Useless,’ said Moses. ‘These things are facts—more stubborn than the bread and wine you have been trying to convert through the centuries. There are only three kinds of converted Jews—fools, lunatics and rogues. Take a man—a man like Davy here will one day become—and convert him if you can!’

‘Perhaps,’ the priest took up the challenge. ‘—we may find a bribe for him, too?’

‘Mr. Moses!’ cried the bewildered Barnett at a loss. Here were these two playing with the future of HIS boy! ‘Mr. Moses!—’xcuse me sayin’ it—you strike me dis minute as a very funny Hebrew-master—ha? To ask—ASK—a Catolic priest—’xcuse me, Reverend Darrel—to converrt MY DAVY!’ Moses smiled. ‘Tink because I alvays say: Let everybody do vhat he likes so long as he doesn’t——’

‘Don’t worry, Cohen,’ consoled Moses. ‘Davy will become neither a fool nor a lunatic nor a rogue. And besides something tells me that in the unlikely event of the improbable possibility I might be spared to take a hand in the—er—merry game.—’Ware the Hebrew-master, Priest!’ he turned pleasantly to Darrel, who—at the moment—had actually forgotten the sole reason of his visit in the exhilaration of the argument. ‘He is the root of the one preservative in Jewry—the Jewish superiority complex.’

‘Yes,’ puzzled Darrel. ‘Always in the East End have I felt that conceit. In the East End more than in the west. The more assimilated your people become, the more they lose this conceit and assume the elegant humility that is even more irritating to the average Gentile. And yet, under all that elegance and humility, one always senses in the still not altogether assimilated Hebrew that wretched sardonic superiority-complex—why? Let us face facts—facts that cannot, as you would say, be converted. You are parasites on the earth. You are landless—and live upon those that live from their lands. You are languageless—you stole Aramaic from the Babylonians, Ladina from the Spaniards, Yiddish from the Germans. You have no specific culture—your scholars are English scholars or French or American or anything but Jewish. So are your artists—your musicians—why, then, are you so conceited—why?’

‘You forget my School for Hebrew,’ smiled Moses. Here Davy dug himself out of his corner and stood, solemn-faced, before the Master.

‘What is it, Davy?’

‘I know something,’ suggested the lad, trying to veil the eagerness in his eyes. ‘Can I say it?’

‘Yes?’ prompted Moses divining the restrained excitement.

‘But donnt be cheeky!’ warned the father afraid for Darrel, whose mind was beginning to revert to his own affairs.

The boy picked up an orange from the dish on the table and held it up in front of Darrel.

‘See this orange, sir?’ the man nodded with an absent smile, and the boy continued guardedly:

‘Teacher told us at school this morning that the earth is like an orange—flat at both poles!’ (A cunning aside this to enhance the climax.)

‘Gorn, Davy!’ reproved the disappointed father. ‘You talking foolishness! Vot on errt’ has de orange to do mit us—ha?’

‘Well,’ giggled the boy triumphantly as he disposed of both question and fruit. ‘We’re the juice—JEWSS!’

Darrel, his thoughts really no longer on the whole thing, smiled an absent appreciation. Moses regarded his bright pupil fondly and perhaps allowed his mind to reach out to the possibility of the future Jewish leader being now in the process of evolving. After some hard thinking and still harder effort at repression, Barnett let himself go.

‘Ha-ha-ha! He-he-he!’

‘Stop dat noise, Barnett! Hold you mout’! You gimme de pip!’ cried Sarah entering unheard through her husband’s loud guffaws. Her parcel was in her hand, her mac half off her shoulders and bad temper in her face. And still Barnett laughed on uncontrollably:

‘Hi-hi-hi! Ho-ho-ho! Hu-hu-hu!’ Having run through all the vowels, he spluttered: ‘Vas a good joke! Vas a good joke!’

Sarah flung the parcel from her hands, flung her mac from her back and, with the fierce exasperation of a careful housewife bereaved of her legitimate stocking-money, flung her words from her mouth.

‘Vas a good joke!’ she mocked. ‘Vas a good joke! Gorn, vake de baby—no? A good joke! A hen vhat cost me fife-und-ninepence goes und gets treifé—und a good joke—no?’

‘Nu?’ still spluttered Barnett. ‘Nu—vhat is it? It’s like de Master vonce said—ha?—like Christianity. Christianity to de Jewss of de orange is also not kosher so ve gif it to de Christians—ha? Gif de hen to Mrs. Johnson de fire-voman—no—ha?’

‘Vhat!’ blazed Sarah reproachfully. ‘A hen vhat had a pin in its stomach shall I gif to a good Christian voman like Mrs. Johnson? Oi! No good Christian voman should haf my hosband! I vouldn’t vish dat my dead enemy! No! I sell it for half-price to de convent-cook down de road—no?’

‘Er. . . .’ began Darrel referring to his watch, and made Sarah happy by providing her with plausible excuse for venting her annoyance.

‘Oi!’ she eyed the fidgeting priest. ‘Perhaps YOU vant de hen—ha—no! I gif it you for nottink—or next to nottink, anyvay. Onnly donnt bodder my head mit little shiksehs! Got enoff trobble vot mit HIM und Davy und de baby—no?’

Relieved, she took the little one out of the cradle, and turned her back on the rest of the world.

‘Comm on, Babilly mine,’ she crooned. ‘Ve donnt vant any shiksehs—ha—no?’

‘A pity de hen got treifé,’ grumbled Barnett aside to Darrel. ‘Vhy didn’t you pray for dat hen instead of arguing—ha?’

Darrel stood up, a grim, not unhumorous expression on his placid features. He buttoned his coat and accepted his hat from the other’s hands.

‘By the way, Mr. Cohen,’ he remarked à propos of nothing, it seemed. ‘My bank is Barrow’s, you know.’

‘Donnt like dem,’ said Barnett shortly. ‘But donnt vorry! Your cheque vas cashed de next minute I got it.’

‘Well, I must be off. And when I’ll see you again—! From Africa I may be sent to China and well, good-bye—all!’

‘Good-bye,’ and Barnett shook the priest’s hand warmly, with a pressure of regret at the collapse of their little plan. ‘Good-bye und—donnt forget you chvoire—ha?’

Darrel laughed and said good-bye to Mrs. Cohen.

‘Good-bye,’ she responded. ‘Gorn, Mr. Darrel. Gorn, take some oranges mit you—no? Soch a long jerrney—Africa—no?’ and she turned a reluctant head from the quiet little Leah. ‘Good-bye! und ’xcuse me for not getting up. All I can vish you is dat if de Africaner eat you, I hope dey get de bellyache—dat’s all—no?’

‘Good-bye!’ added Moses his blessing as he gripped the departing missionary’s hand. ‘—and when you’ve converted all the heathen from sin to—GIN, you can come back for a go at—Davy.’

The speaker laughed low as at a pleasant jest; the other answered slowly:

‘I won’t forget.’ Then: ‘Don’t trouble, Mr. Cohen. I should know my way by now. Good-bye!’

After Davy had let the priest out, he slipped back upstairs in order that his presence should not fetter his Master’s little talk with his father. With him, of course, he took the puzzle same as Jimmy Bolton had, and which neither of them yet could solve.

The pause that often follows a parting, however casual, followed Darrel’s departure.

7. MOSES’ MISSION TO THE JEWS

Moses, in the reaction to the second tragedy of his life, had become a fanatic for all things Jewish. Though he may not have realized it, his fanaticism was, at the bottom, a means of self-preservation. It gave him a reason for living on after life had shown itself unreasonable. He now could treasure his night memories; for he found in them a mysterious way of providence; leading him into his present loneliness, enabling him to devote his whole life to God’s cause. He had become a direct servant of God; his work to rouse God’s people, Israel, to an understanding of its divine mission in the world. His loneliness enabled him to be thorough. His loneliness made him strong. His School for Hebrew was a training place for the future generation of Jewish leaders—a centre from which vigorous Judaism would radiate far beyond its own confines. He loved his pupils, his Davys. But the parents of his pupils worried him. Some of them, like Barnett, were obstructing his work. Their lives were incompatible with the Judaism he was teaching. They were neglecting the old customs, the old race-preserving taboos. Their influence on the children scared him. Anglo-Judaism especially seemed to him in a state of flux, and the old customs seemed the only solidities to which one could helpfully cling. He was an English Jew and knew his Anglo-Jewry. He knew and deplored the deterioration of the old scholar-Rabbi system into the tame-cat parson-Minister arrangement of the United Synagogue, followed more reluctantly or conservatively by the provincial communities. Then the Sabbath. Perhaps the greatest Jewish contribution to humanity. And the Barnetts of the world were compromising—keeping the Sabbath at home holy and profaning it in their shops. No. He could not very well remain silent. He hoped to influence the parents by the children; but not to attempt direct ways would be cowardly. He had to speak to these Barnetts. That was why he was that evening in the Cohens’ kitchen. Dimly the other two were aware of the reason of the Master’s visit. All three were uncomfortable, at a loss how to begin or how to avoid the subject. The silence grew irksome, strained. Sarah put the infant back into the cradle and turned to her husband as he stood fidgeting with the evening paper.

‘You know vhat, Barnett?’ she began. ‘I donnt like de vay Baby is so qviet to-day. Vot you tink, Barnett, should ve call de doctor?’

Here was a means to delay and Barnett seized it eagerly.

‘Oi, de vomen! Oi, de vomen!’ he appealed to Moses and the gaslight, and then continued to Moses as man to man. ‘Tell me—vhy donnt babies grow on trees—ha? Dat’s vhat I ask. Vhy donnt babies grow on trees? Vhen dey (referring to the Sarahs of the world)—vhen dey AIN’T got a baby to play mit den dey’re mad. Vhen dey YES got a baby den they’re meshuggé! Vhen de baby’s qviet it’s Oi veh! bring a doctor! Vhen de baby should cry a bit den it’s Oi veh! bring a shpetzzalist! Tell me, Mr. Moses. Vhy donnt babies grow on trees—ha? Dat’s——’

But Sarah would not have been Sarah if she had taken all this slander supinely.

‘Mr. Moses!’ she complained bitterly. ‘Donnt listen to him. He got no Jewish hearrt! You should haf herrd him beforr vhen he cerrsed de baby!’ and here she started the weeping stunt—woman’s best aid in time of troubling. ‘Oi, Mr. Moses! You vouldn’t tink it vas a Jewish fader at all!’

Barnett was astounded at the bare-faced accusation.

‘Not a Jewish fader? Vhat odder kind—ha? Sarah, I tell you vhat! You meshuggé! I, ME, cerrse de baby!’

But Sarah had a woman’s memory.

‘Didn’t you say de baby should (on de goyyim!) be dead und buried und den you vould go to shool und be religious for anodder whole yerr—no? Gorn! Lemmelonn! Donnt spik to me!’

‘Mr. Moses!’ appealed the accused. ‘I ask you. I can read und write und I spik Ainglish jost like a proper Ainglishman und I’m a naturalized British sobjec’ und I’m a master for mineself mit six machinerrs und I gif Davy to you Hebrew-school-cheder und never owe you a penny cheder money. You know me den. I ask you. Am I de man to do soch a tink—ha?’

Moses was too wise to take sides.

‘You not a man!’ countered Sarah from the cradle.

‘How long ve been married—ha?’ queried Barnett.

‘That reminds me,’ casually intruded the missionary to the Jews. ‘Davy as it happens is the real cause of my coming this evening.’ A peculiar but effective à propos.

‘A scamp—a blegatch (raggamuffin)—ha?’ fenced the father, uncomfortable. Sarah, too, subconsciously felt there could be no more putting the thing off; nevertheless she followed her husband’s lead, saying:

‘Misbehaving—ha?’

‘No,’ blurted Moses desperately. ‘Not Davy. It’s his father——’

‘Vhat!’ and Barnett jumped up in but slightly simulated anger. He would show this narrow-minded Hebrew-master that a master tailor and a proper Ainglishman could not be browbeaten with impunity. After all, who was this Moses? Only a Hebrew-teacher. There were hundreds of Hebrew-teachers. He, Barnett Cohen, had not made a contract with Moses for life. He was not married to this Moses. And even a marriage—in the English papers—was only for ‘de better or divorce!’ Sarah responded nobly to his S.O.S.

‘Mr. Moses,’ she spoke severely. ‘I donnt gif my Davy to you cheder you should comm here und insolt his fader. Dat’s MY business!’

‘Mr. Moses!’ cried Sarah’s business. ‘You tink you an Ainglishman you de onnly Hebrew-master—ha? Plenty! Plenty!—Davy! At vonce!’

Absentmindedly hummed Moses the tri-BAM-im-bim melody and made a pretence of searching the evening paper as from upstairs floated down the shrill cry of his pupil.

‘In a minu—te!’

‘Davy!’ assisted the mother. ‘You fader’s calling!’

‘In a minute! I’m just in the middle!’

‘I’m comming to you,’ threatened the father. ‘Davy-y!’

‘Don’t bother, father!’ soothed the hopeful. ‘I’m coming soon!’

‘Davy-y-y-y-y-y!’ shrilled Sarah regardless of the infant in her lap, who by its indifference, must have accustomed itself from birth to these alarms much as earth’s denizens are accustomed to the music of the spheres.

‘Ye-e-e-e-e-es?’ shrilled back David and gained the battle for his teacher; for Sarah, with a rueful sideways glance at her discomfited husband, resigned both for him and for herself—not without some inner satisfaction.

‘Davy!’ she shamelessly lied. ‘De Master vants you!’

Followed a second time that evening a noise as of a miniature tornado, and the boy stood again in front of his teacher, a knowing—under the circumstances almost sinful—smile spoiling his otherwise respectful look.

‘Yessir,’ he panted, the puzzle in his hands. ‘Here I am, sir!’

But Moses was still absentmindedly humming the tri-BAM-im-bim melody and searching the evening paper, and Sarah, with feminine cowardice, pushed Barnett in the lurch.

‘You say it, Barnett,’ she retreated. ‘I got to attend to de baby!’

Barnett recognized he was deserted. Well, if he had to surrender he would make a good job of it.

‘Ahem,’ he coughed to his young hopeful. ‘Davy! You Master says you a good boy in the Hebrew class und dat if you a good boy as well in de house und comm vhen you fader-mudder calls you und haf proper respec’ for you fader-mudder like a Jewish chil’ should haf, den—den you can comm mit me every Friday night und Shabbos morning to de Duke’s Place shool to hear de new chazan—ah?’

From the cradle Sarah, belatedly, made a hypocritical protest.

‘Barnett!’ and Barnett joyed turning the tables.

‘Vell?’ he stared back at her and recalled her snub of half an hour ago.

‘Nottink,’ she submitted in her turn as Moses, humming the traditional tune, considered.

Without the backing of Young Jewry, his Jewish mission to the Jews must fail.

8. THE BASTARD

The rather strained pause that followed Barnett’s momentous decision was interrupted by a loud hammering at the street door. Davy, mindful of the tacit understanding upon which his father seemed to have relied, did not wait to be told. As he opened the door a roughish voice greeted him with:

‘Left till called for. ’Night!’ and on the step he encountered a most unexpected surprise.

‘Hey!’ He cried after the vanished owner of the roughish voice. ‘Hey, Mister! take it away!’

‘Donnt keep de door open!’ came to him his mother’s scolding tones. ‘De baby’ll catch colld cholliloh (far be it)! Oi, vot a draught! Bring it in vhatever it is und—qvick!—shut de door!’

Disgustedly Davy obeyed. As he opened the kitchen door he ungallantly tore away his fingers from the timid clutch and pushed the ‘left-till-called-for’ into the room.

‘The bloomin’ cheek!’ he protested as the three adults gasped. ‘Shoved it in my arms and skeedaddled!’

The little mite stared about her forlorn. She had on white fleecy clothes, and round her neck the woollen rope of her wee muff was entangled with a fine gold chain bearing a little gold cross. Unthinkingly the child, though hampered with its white fingerless gloves, pulled off its coat-cowl and displayed a mass of flaxen curls framing a delicate little olive face from which stared out on to the wide world the largest and bluest eyes that ever were. Those eyes travelled all round the room to fix their baby beam on the humming Hebrew-master whom she confidently approached and handed up from her muff as high as she could tip-toe a closed envelope, large and official-looking.

‘Are you Mr. Cohen?’ the mite lisped, and her rose-bud dainty mouth smiled wistfully and with a childish, winsome appeal.

And nothing told Moses that here was his own flesh and blood. He shook his head with decided emphasis and betrayed Barnett with a slanting thumb. The mite turned away from her grandfather and travelled courageously the yard and a half required. Again she tip-toed and repeated:

‘Are you Mr. Cohen?’

‘Nu?’ Barnett temporized, nervously suspicious of his latest caller’s identity. Queer that he and Sarah should have guessed such a great deal and yet not have guessed enough.

The child handed him the letter and said confidently:

‘I’m left to be called for by the convent sister soon. My guardian said (as rehearsing a lesson—with private additions) I’m to give you this envelope and that you’re to be my guardian from now as well.’ Barnett ruefully accepted service, and the ward-expectant continued: ‘And I’m to live at the convent and I’m to come to you for pennies—I like new pennies best, please!’ and with that she turned her little back on the flabbergasted Barnett and went to reconnoitre further afield. She stopped before the mother and child.

‘Are you Mrs. Cohen?’ she inquired politely while her great blue eyes devoured little Leah.

‘Nu?’ curtly demanded Sarah while her husband pretended to read the missive and while the Master hummed and idly followed the child with his eyes, and while Davy re-concentrated on the puzzle same as Jimmy Bolton.

‘My guardian said,’ the lesson was recited in the best manner—‘that I’m to live at the convent and that I’m to come to you for my ribbons—I like new ones best—all colours, please!—O! Is dis dolly alive? Is it a sleeping dolly? Will it cry “Mama!” if I squeeze its stomach?’

‘Sqveeze its stomach!’ cried after her the horrified Sarah, and ‘My mistake!’ confessed Barnett. ‘He vould haf made a very good tailor—mitout practice. Vhat’s you name—little gell?’

And the child reluctantly left Leah the baby and, putting back her hands respectfully into her muff, replied in a shaky voice:

‘My name is Nora, only Guardy he calls me Chucky for short. And Guardy he’s gone away and I got no mummy—and nobody’—here the great blue eyes filled like floody pools of Heshbon on a Palestinian spring day—‘nobody’ll never call me Chucky anymore!’

‘Here, shut it!’ impatiently broke in Davy, anxious to dispel the maudlin atmospherics that threatened. ‘I’ll call yer Chucky,’ he grimly assured the child. ‘Father,’ he appealed, ‘shall I CHUCKY ’er out?’

‘Davy!’ his father discouraged him, glancing sideways at Sarah brooding into the fire. ‘You leave her alonn!—Comm here, er—Chuckynora,’ he called compromisingly. ‘Here’s a not too olld penny und go und play a bit vhile ve tink you over—ha?’

Though nothing told the teacher, he yet seemed incapable of taking his eyes off the little maid as, clutching the penny, she considered the rival attractions of little Leah in her mother’s lap and Davy crouched over his puzzle. The latter won. Perhaps it was the ‘treat ’em rough’ way he had that lured the feminine in her.

‘Nu?’ demanded the husband counsel of the wife. ‘Nu, my life, vhat you say?’

‘I say?’ impatiently and with self-conscious irritation surrendered the woman to the priest. ‘I say: Get a nottbook und put down de expenses!’

‘Vhat?’ demanded Barnett the implied decision in greater precision.

‘De penny isn’t expenses—no?’ flung back Sarah in economic anger.

Nora at last found courage to approach the puzzle-solver. Timidly she stretched out her mittened hand.

‘Will you play with me?’ she invited. ‘I’m a nice little girl!’

But David, well schooled in Moses’ School for Hebrew, rejected the Gentile’s advances and turned scornfully away from the maid.

‘Play with you? YOU? You’re not a little girl! You—you’re only a shiksheh!’

1. BEFORE THE NORMANDY CONQUEST

AFTER Genesis—Exodus, and in between—twelve years. Twelve years before Barnett and Sarah moved from east to west, from the Lane to Kew. Twelve years for Davy to become a man and for Nora to become a woman. Twelve years it took Darrel in the wilds to erase with bloody scourge and filthy hair-shirt under immaculate linen the remorse, engendered with a human life, of one red night. Twelve years it took Moses to become a recruiting sergeant.

Only for Reb Zalman in the Shtiebel passed the twelve years placidly. In the study of infinity between the covers of the Holy ZOHAR, what mattered twelve years?

Years pass so vaguely that in vain one often grasps at some unvague moment—some incident, more tangible than the rest, to point the passing time.

Many such moments have eluded the writer. One such moment however he has been fortunate enough to hold fast. A Friday-night memory of David Jacob Cohen.

Jacob? Yes. Soon after the lad had scholarshipped his way into the secondary school, he fell ill. His parents cheated the death Angel by adding another name to David. Sure enough, the Destroyer, at the sick boy’s bedside, referred to his note-book and decided that he had been sent for David and not for David Jacob. With contracted brows he impatiently passed on. He was very busy at that period. Leaving the house he had occasion to refer again to his note-book, and saw with satisfaction that on his return journey he would again have to call and that he would not a second time depart empty-handed. Leah the baby showed no signs of ailing excepting a preternatural, open-eyed calm—yet one day, soon after Davy’s recovery, Leah the baby remained Leah the baby for ever.

Sarah now had the dearly-bought satisfaction of seeing Reb Zalman at her table on Sabbath afternoons. As in her father’s house in Pamunitzé in the olden days, so now too the Rabbi partook of tea from the sabbath samovar—with lemon. The bereaved parents remembered Barnett’s poor joke, and tacitly suspected God of having accepted it as a serious challenge. Barnett became religious; he took in a Gentile partner in order to be completely free on the Sabbath day. A partner necessitated a complicated system of book-keeping, which, for all the Jew’s night-school training, had perforce to be entrusted to the Gentile’s superior education. Barnett was robbed in a competent English manner. The firm of Cohen and Thompson went bankrupt. Barnett started all over again and Sarah once more turned to felling and buttonholing, nor ever threw up to her husband his pitiful jest.

Davy’s dreams were often invaded by his names. At nights came crowding round him those heroes of deathless fame: Joab of the iron heart; El-azar of the tired hand—so called because he fought the Philistines till his hand was weary of slaying; Adeno of the eight hundred slain; Abishai of the death-spear—knights of a table round that in after days was to be imitated by a British Arthur. His victory over Goliath, in Davy’s dreams, but a youthful exploit.

Davy was a Cohen—lineal descendant of Aaron, first Cohen and High Priest. And upon these atavistic mnemonics impinged his new name, Jacob.

2. ONE FRIDAY NIGHT

Outside the atmosphere was icy damp, and black, star-hiding clouds lowered sullenly over the slippery metropolis. Rich men in heavy coats and shining goloshes hurried through the streets towards warm homes and hotels. Furred ladies nestled themselves well into their cars and flashed their way to theatres and music-halls.

Along the Embankment ragged forms huddled closely together, seeking in each other the warmth they might not find in their individual selves.

Commercial Street roared and flared on both sides throughout its whole length, excepting where gaps in the walls of light showed where little yards and alleys led to the residential district of the ghetto. In one of these residential districts lived the Cohen family. The combined kitchen and living-room looked out upon a Russian baths building where, in the daytime—and especially on Fridays—Jews might be seen entering, carrying their change of linen in white parcels, with the care and the dust of the week darkening their sombre features. There they gave their bodies up to the cleansing powers of massed clouds of steam, as they lay on shelves like another race of nude Olympians—excepting that a brick wall divided them from any goddesses. Then would come a half-clad attendant with a handful of twigs, and birch them well and truly till the blood, made sluggish in the heat of the steam, coursed anew in stimulated veins. Out of the portals which they had entered, grimy and bowed and careworn, these Jews would issue, a few hours later, fresh and straight and ruddy, ready for another week’s load of the Jewish burden.

David Jacob Cohen was very fond of watching this scene on a Friday before shool-time. The contrast between those going out and those coming in pleased the artistic side of him. He had had plenty of time that morning to gratify this side of him. The holidays were still on; and the scholarship swotting did not take up all HIS spare time. He expected to get through rather easily. He had a secret contempt for swotters as a class. In fact, his soul soared higher than the bursary he was supposed to be studying for so strenuously.

Please, don’t whisper it in Middlesex Street, where another David Cohen lived, nor tell it in Petticoat Lane where the mother of Ikey Levinson’s cousin, Becky Jacobs, had a fish stall—Jack’s ambition was to be a poet.

The parlour was now a tailor’s shop. The workroom was a bedroom upstairs, piled on one side with rolls of cloth and lining, and filled on the other side with a long table and two sewing machines where Barnett Cohen and his wife Sarah laboured from Sunday morning till Friday eve.

David was now their only child, upon whom all their parental love was concentrated. Of this intensity of affection the lad was almost unconscious. But he felt that, more than other parents, his were anxious for him to get on—that is, win scholarships, become a teacher—the University was for the present beyond available means—and achieve gentility.

All the week David felt this parental urge towards his schoolwork and homework; but from Friday eve to Saturday night was now the Sabbath, the Sabbath of Rest, the Sabbath of the Lord God of Israel, when Barnett, after his steam bath over the way, would hie to the Shtiebel—somehow more attune than the Duke’s Place Synagogue. There, accompanied by Davy, he would carol after the Chazan (Cantor) the chorus to the joyous song of Solomon Levy:

The pronunciation of Hebrew has varied at different times and in different places during the Exile. Davy never got rid of the doubt at the back of his mind that the pronunciation he was accustomed to was in some indistinct way corrupt. And this doubt was deepened after his thirteenth birthday when he first made use of his manly privilege to rise, with other men of the priestly line of Aaron the first Cohen, to bless the congregation.

With his father as his example, he had removed his shoes, and in stockinged feet had passed to the toilet room where men of the tribe of Levi that were not descendants of Aaron stood ready with a jug to pour water over his hands. For a moment, in place of the white enamel bowl, there spread under his fingers the rim of a great brazen laver polished like yellow gold and upborne on the backs of brazen bulls—for a moment like the flash of a dream—and then all was as before, and he was drying his hands upon a towel and robing himself in a big, woollen tallis (prayershawl) borrowed from a complaisant adult, and following his father to the ark.

Slowly the Chazan, with many a twirl and many a sob, reached the priestly blessing. All the congregation stood and bowed their heads. The priests drew their prayershawls over their heads, spread their fingers two by two, and word for word repeated the blessing after the Chazan.

Davy mingled his treble with the basses of the men and lost himself in the glory of the divine privilege.

The Chazan in a sad monotone chanted:

May He bless thee—and the priests re-echoed the sad monotone but with an added inflexion of ultimate triumph:

May He bless thee—

The Chazan: The Lord—

The priests: The Lord—

The Chazan: And guard thee!

The priests: And guard thee! In the hiatus the congregation with whispered breath uttered words of power against the evil dreams of life; while the priests, losing themselves in ecstasy of rhythm, swayed to the right and the left with outstretched hands under covering prayershawls, and crooned weirdly over the bowed heads of the people.

Suddenly the youngest Cohen, swaying in semi-unconscious imitation of his elders, felt himself vanishing away in the dusk of his enwrapping tallis. And out from the dusk appeared a host—with faces swarthy and ruddy and pale and fair; bearded and smooth; men of the tribe of Zebulun with the grey glint of the sea in their eyes; men of Judah and Benjamin; men of Dan and Naphtali; men of Menasseh from over the Jordan—faces and faces and faces; hundreds and thousand and tens of thousands, all eagerly uplifted into a vibrant sea to await his coming out of the Holy of Holies safe and living. A sea of faces tense with ear-strain to catch the tinkling of the golden bells that, alternating with golden pomegranates, hung from his high-priestly robe and trembled with his every movement. At last he stood before the hangings and turned his face towards them. The whole congregation of Israel saw the calm and glory thereon, and raised a great shout that suddenly hushed itself to a murmur as of a happy breeze on the hills of Lebanon.

Raising his hands above the bowed heads, he lifted up his eyes to the heavens and blessed his people:

In the Shtiebel flashed a startled silence as the boy’s shrill clarion tones rang with a strange accent on the ears of the amazed congregation.

Many cried out it was wrong to admit so young a lad among the older priests to make a farce of the holy ritual by striking out for himself, and not waiting to follow with his elders. It was a shame, a scandal. And what kind of way was it he had been taught his Hebrew! The lad himself was troubled and could make out no reason for the alarm as he awoke from his atavistic memories to the disturbed realities of the day. He was shivering as from a great effort and his pallid face was wet with cold perspiration.

That afternoon Reb Zalman for the first time honoured their kitchen with his presence. He regarded the lad closely, calmed his parents, but did not disclose that, unnoted by the congregation, David had that morning uttered the Shem—the very name of God, unrevealed excepting to the limited number of the world’s saints—the holy band of the lamed-vov—the thirty-six.

By the time Davy entered for the pupil teacher’s bursary, the incident had become dim in the mind of the lad and in the mind of his parents—but not in the mind of Reb Zalman, who, whenever he came across the lad, never failed to give him a curious smile and an affectionate, almost brotherly pat.

Friday evening, after service, David and his father would return home to find the kitchen scrubbed and emeried and brassoed, and the table covered with a clean white linen cloth, in the centre of which stood three lit candles in burnished brass candlesticks. Before the passing of Leah the baby there had been four. The two Sabbath loaves were covered with an embroidered serviette, that Sarah had worked in her maidenhood in preparation for the time when she would have a home of her own. The bottle of raisin wine glimmered red and black in the gas-and-candle shine, and crimsoned the silver goblet that stood ready for Kiddush (sanctification); and the Sabbath of Rest was ushered in. After greeting the angels that visit every Jewish house on Friday eve, Barnett praised his wife in the words of Solomon the King—who undoubtedly spoke from experience. Like the patriarchs of old might have done, he laid his hands in blessing on wife and child, and then he and his son made Kiddush, drank wine of which the woman partook, and they all washed hands and sat down to the Sabbath supper of fried fish and lockshen soup and sweet carrots and chicken, and in between the courses, sang songs in praise of the Sabbath Bride. Grace chanted, Barnett and Davy drew their chairs together, opened the Hebrew Pentateuch with its Rashi commentary and studied together the Torah. Since Leah’s death this had grown into a weekly custom. Sarah dozed peacefully in the rocking chair and—this Friday night grasped from the twelve years between Genesis and Exodus—Barnett gradually followed her example. Even while Davy was construing:

Vayomer elov—and he said to him, mah sh’mecho—what is thy name, vayomer—and he said, Yâkov—Jacob, vayomer—and he said, lo Yâkov—not Jacob, ye-omer—shall be said, od—anymore, sh’mecho—thy name, ki-im—but, Yisroel—Israel, ki—because, soriso—thou hast struggled, im—with, elohim—gods, v’im—and with, anoshim—men, vatuchol—and thou hast prevailed. (Gen. xxxii. 27-28.)

Davy looked up from the Law. A great pity filled him as he saw his parents utterly tired out with the week’s grind. His mother was softly snoring in front of the red fire, and his father’s head was nodding lower and lower. Davy moved quietly to the sofa, took from it a cushion and, stepping softly, laid it on the table by his father’s arm. The sleeper nodded and nodded till the bald, skull-capped head rested upon the subconsciously felt pillow. The lad returned to the sofa, knelt and looked out through the window on the dark, narrow street from whose far end came the roar of the adjacent traffic and lured and drew.

Often would David walk the streets of London at night—to get an appetite for sleep. In the solitary places and in the crowded streets he would shuffle along, hands deep in pockets, shoulders hunched, eyes half-closed, seeking—seeking that which he could never describe even to himself in articulate fashion. True, he had ventured to make poems of his thoughts—poems that to their fifteen-year old author seemed vastly superior to the Shakespeare and Milton test-pieces that the English master so overlauded. One of these precious poems of the boy’s making was hammering at his brain as he knelt by the window that Friday night, hammering and luring him, drawing him out into the night:

Suddenly the lad gave in to the lure. He huddled himself into his overcoat and passed furtively out. Reaching the Minories he veered down to the Embankment by the Tower Bridge.

Barely seeing where his feet led him, Davy Jacob brooded, turning rhymes in his mind and striving, with the self-glorification of the poet, to set himself the task of solving the problem of life. Again and again repeated itself in his mind the blunt challenge to the Master:

Why come we, why go we like dreams in the night—

Why? Why? Why? What sense was there in sending souls down from heaven to earth—to work and suffer and to have to do all the contemptible things connected with the body?

A second-hand copy of Omar Khayyam for a penny had been assistant. Davy Jacob blamed neither the Persian poet nor FitzGerald nor his own adolescence for his poetry and for his failure to succeed where Job, a greater than he, had only vaguely succeeded. It was not that he feared death.

Came upon him the recollection of one night of convalescence when the Angel of Death had seemed very close; blanketed in an icy, clammy sweat, he dared not close his eyes lest the negation invite the grisly spectre. His mouth was arid, but he was too afraid to reach out for the cup of water at his bedside. From the cot came the soft breathing of his little sister, Leah the baby, and the terror in him gave way to an immense pity that even that quiet, tiny mite must die—if not to-night then some other night. And he fell to wondering what kind of death would have Leah the baby. And so wondering he slept to dream of the little shikseh from the convent who now and then was brought by a nun to see his father. And he awoke the next morning with the feeling that never again would death dare to frighten him.

Yet when, a few days later, Leah the baby quietly died, Davy remembered his premonition and thereafter shut out from the rest of the world a troubling apprehension of some inexplicable part of his nature.

Many and many a time had he walked as he was walking now, scarce conscious of the beauty of the yellow streaks across the rippling river. His mind was busy with arguments attacking the waste about him. All this life—this bustle—this torrent of souls—débris—waste—what else? And to the boy’s high-strung imagination the Master appeared as an invisible omnipresence, smiling sardonically at the daring one’s vehemence.

Why come we—cried the young poet to the Silence.

Why go we—and the laughter of the Silence puffed into the vastness and irritated the self-torn heart of the poet.

—Like dreams in the night?—O! It was horrible thus always to be demanding and never—never to obtain reply.

It wasn’t fair! It was cowardly in this manner to match a puny human body against the vast silence that puffed out the earth. Face to face—body to body—let the Lord of the world appear and defend himself against the charge of man.

And Davy Jacob strode on, his pace increasing with the intensity of his brooding, and came to the brink of the river. Overhead the clear, starry sky stretched in boundless beauty, and on either hand palm trees shone black against the Mesopotamian night. He had sent his wives and his children and his slaves over to the other side by the narrow ford a little lower down, and he himself was waiting.

Changing his staff from the right hand to the left, he plucked impatiently at his thick, black beard and waited.

Waited till towards him came a man. And they wrestled together till the rising of the dawn. And when the man saw that he could not prevail against him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s thigh so that the socket of Jacob’s thigh was dislocated as he wrestled with him. And he said:

‘Let me go for the dawn has come up,’ and, as Jacob refused, the sleeping couple were roused by their Davy, huddled on the sofa, crying in shrill, excited hysteria:

‘Lo ashalechacha ki-im berachtani!—I will not let thee go until thou hast blessed me!’

Next day Davy was recovered from the fit of weakness that ensued—quite recovered, except for a slight limp which the doctor stated was a temporary result of the sleep-numbed limb being suddenly brought into action.

But Jacob—he knew better—as, that Sabbath afternoon, he confided his vision to two visitors, Mr. Moses and Reb Zalman. On leaving the patient, Moses looked questioningly to Reb Zalman. Reb Zalman said not a word. Perhaps he remembered that he was very old and perhaps his mutely moving lips were praying for knowledge of his successor into the band of the thirty-six wondermen that never diminish in Israel. But if Reb Zalman was of the thirty-six, he did well in keeping silence, for it has been laid upon them that they shall not declare themselves, nor may they know even one the other unless by divine intent. Mr. Moses was more than aware of the rumours current in the East End about Reb Zalman. The mystic in the Hebrew-teacher leaped towards the hundredth part of a suspicion that perhaps David Jacob Cohen. . .

3. THREADS

By the time Davy was ready to become a Pupil Teacher, his father had again made good, and Davy scholarshipped his way gaily to Cambridge. The first thing he learned there was to doubt the teaching of Moses. Hitherto Genesis was Genesis and Evolution Evolution and never the twain might meet. At Cambridge they met with little benefit to Genesis. Almost all his life he had been wont to bring his perplexities to Moses, who thought fit to exert all means at his command to attach the boy to him. Moses himself was an extremely well-read man. Apart from the grounding he had obtained when studying in his youth for his B.A., his fear of sleep had driven him to books, and he was well qualified to deal with the lad’s trouble. But he took the lad to the Shtiebel instead, late one night, when Reb Zalman’s students had departed and the Rabbi was alone. And the Rabbi spoke to him and told him how there had been many worlds ere this, how a day and a thousand years were the same in the eyes of Eternity, how this world and all worlds that were and all that will be are but manifestations of God—how matter was but spirit and life but thought. How the material part of the universe was but the self manifestation of Divinity and how all our lives were but thoughts of God. And how just as our thoughts lived in us so long as we lived, so we lived in God as long as God lived—eternally. And Davy thought of the new theory of the construction of the atom, of the intangibility of proton and electron; he thought of his essays in psychology and marvelled at the old Rabbi; and returned to Cambridge and in a lecture in the Debating Society showed that the Revised Version had wrongly interpreted the Hebrew. ‘In the beginning God—’ was a very fine phrase, but not Genesis and not Hebrew. The first chapter of the Torah presumed only that ‘In the beginning WHEN God manifested Heaven and Earth, etc.’ The youthful disciple of Moses and Reb Zalman traced the evolution of the earth through its various days or eras—from the gaseous, without form and void, to the condensing mists capable of reflecting light, then to the cooler stage of liquid and solid, then to the life starting in the hot, watery mists, manifesting itself in vegetation engendered in the coagulating muds by the mists even before the atmosphere had thinned sufficiently to permit sun and moon and stars to reveal themselves. He spoke how the fauna began in the waters, evolved into bird life and amphibia and beast and cattle and, at last, into man. All this and more he deduced from that first chapter of Genesis. Genesis did not presume to begin from the Beginning. There was no Beginning. The Hebrew was silent as to any First Day. ‘And it was evening and it was morning One Day.’ Not from the beginning even of the present universe commenced Genesis. Only from the beginning of this earth. Before the earth’s genesis God’s days were infinite. The Torah took one day and thence, through six of these æons or God’s days, traced the history of this our planet. Nor does the Torah after the evolution of man write ‘It was evening and it was morning—the Seventh Day.’ The seventh era—the human era—is not yet done. . . . And so Davy spouted, and was admired and was criticized, and sent a report of his speech to his father and mother, who understood the photo that decorated the report better than the letterpress. And Barnett showed it all round and received congratulations—the heartiest from Moses and quietest from Reb Zalman.

On his next vacation Davy found an intruder in the Cohen household—a young lady who occupied his back bedroom, himself relegated to the attic. The intruder shared the family meals and went every day to a business college a penny bus-stage to the north-east.

Before going up to Cambridge, Davy had always been too busy to take much notice of the shikseh from the convent who, upon rare occasions, accompanied by a white-coiffed, black-garbed nun, had visited his parents. He had always understood that it was some matter of business that was transacted when these Gentile females came into the parlour and were treated with mother’s home-made cake and raisin wine. Only once before did he recollect this shikseh to have stayed overnight. Something had happened in the convent and Nora had slept with his mother, and his father had slept with him. It was just after the death of Leah the baby. His father had early in the morning entered the room and found his Sarah in the Gentile child’s arms, crying softly her sorrow away. Since Leah the baby had died, she had not cried; and Barnett was grateful to the little shikseh for his wife’s healing tears. The child’s eyes stared wet and wide at him as he softly backed out from the room as from a holy place.

It was a queer thing to have this Gentile girl of lanky sixteen about the house. She was a shade too young for David who, in his eighteenth year, had a leaning towards women much older than himself. Of course, he was not unbesmirched by the pawings of sex. He had read Balzac’s stories and bits, at least, of Rabelais. The Decameron was no furtive string-bound mystery to him. He had even adventured on Casanova who, if he did him no other good, certainly improved his French. But in Davy’s case the edge of sex-revelation had been blunted in his fourteenth year when he had studied along with grown-ups near Reb Zalman’s table the Mishna tractate on the purification of women. The husk of sex knowledge had been his long before his own maturity provided the grain. Hence the frank sensuality of French authors and the bravado obscenity of his Cambridge friends were more in the nature of amplification than revelation, and affected his main life-outlook but little and rarely. Not to be an exception from his fellows, he flirted with mature females and once nearly got entangled. But the woman’s camisole was filthy, and he escaped from the bedroom in disgust. Afterwards he heard of another chap who had not been as faddy and who had received more than he had bargained and paid for. Davy congratulated himself and made a vow to preserve his virginity for the Jewish maid whom one day he would lead under the wedding canopy, the chuppah. As he kept faith, I am afraid that from this tale, Mademoiselle Aphrodite, you are dismissed.

In confidence his father explained to him the rights of the intrusion. The Bank in which Nora’s guardian had left an ample sum had gone smash. He, Barnett, had never had any confidence in Barrow’s. Well, he was also a guardian, was he not? And business was quite all right; so, after much deliberation with Sarah, he had decided, since Darrel had not been heard of for some time and, anyway, could not be traced, that the girl should leave the convent and learn to earn her own living. But the girl must not be told that she was living on his bounty. It would be cruel. She must believe that such was her priest-guardian’s arrangement. And one day Darrel, unless the Africaner had already had the bellyache, was sure to turn up; and he, Barnett, would get his money back—with interest. Meanwhile the girl was a kind of companion to Sarah who, now that the business was again apart from the house, and Davy away at Cambridge, was rather lonely.

And Nora was not above making herself useful in her new home. It was certainly more vital than the convent. True, Sarah had so far unbent to prosperity that she permitted a day-woman to do the rough housework. Nevertheless there was always something to do, and it did not take long for the shikseh to win her way completely into the half-empty mother-heart. The memory of that one night when she stayed over was the bridge for their affections. For the first few months the girl suffered from a nervous semi-scaredness. It took her some time to penetrate through the couple’s peculiar humour. Their jokes and tea-cup bickerings at first puzzled her and kept her strange. But she drew closer to them. Perhaps the one thing above all that removed the strangeness of the association was the Gentile girl’s instant appreciation, after her convent fare, of Jewish cookery. She learned, at her own request, to make lockshen—not shop-purchased vermicelli, but real lockshen, home-made with flour and water and egg; the dough rolled out to a thirty-second of an inch in thinness and then rolled up like a golden scroll and shredded to the fineness of cigarette tobacco. Sarah cutting lockshen fascinated the girl. Sarah would guide the knife with thumb-touch while her head was turned a little to one side and while her eyes were anywhere but on the sharp steel. Nora never succeeded in shredding lockshen like Sarah, but from the outset she enjoyed its slithery delights in her first plate of Jewish chicken soup. And then gefillté fish. One takes haddock and bream or pike and hake or two kinds of fresh-water fish and one fillets them and minces them fine with onions and salt and pepper and—Sarah’s secret this—a grated young carrot, and one stuffs some skin-rounds or one makes them into balls and one cooks them in the stock of the fishskins and bones and behold—gefillté fish! to be served with a little of the gravy and with chrein. Chrein? Horseradish, reader, grated with beetroot and tightly stoppered so that its pungency brings cleansing tears to the eyes. And then kreplach—little balls of chopped meat cooked in three-cornered jackets of lockshen-dough—but no more. Jewish cookery has been throughout the ages the greatest enemy of those forces that would destroy Israel. And Nora seemed instinctively to take to Sarah’s cooking.

And she had a flair about the house. The curtains hung better after a touch from her deft fingers. Flowers appeared. The parlour became a pretty sitting-room and lost its stiff air of empty exclusiveness. She helped entertain visitors, including Moses and Reb Zalman, to the former of whom she was queerly drawn. Reb Zalman made her feel strange, as though she were a riddle he had long ago solved. But with Moses she felt at home and, herself puzzled, she sought to snare his affection. She learned he had an old Yost and now and then would pretend her own portable was amiss in order to present an excuse for invading his schoolroom, behind whose curtains she clicked away and listened to the children learning their Hebrew. But that was not till a couple of years had passed. In that time she learned to look forward to Davy’s homecomings.

Nora remained a good Catholic. Sarah saw to that. She let her do no manner of work on Sunday, saw that she went regularly to confession and to mass, restricted her to fish dinners on Fridays and scolded her if ever she left off the little gold cross inscribed ‘from your father’ that she had brought with her when first she had stepped across the threshold many years back. Nora bore the scoldings meekly and behaved as a good Catholic shikseh should behave. The elder woman’s strict attention to the minutiæ of her own religious ritual drove the girl in self-justification to church at unearthly hours of the morning. The home of the orthodox Jew—yes, Barnett was become quite a pillar of orthodoxy and a candidate for warden of his synagogue—was sensually related to the ritual of the Catholic Church. Candles and wine and chant and sanctification were common to both. Easter was but Passover. Fast and feast in each bore a family resemblance. To Nora Jews were Catholics of a foreign type. As sex began to ferment in the maid, she vented its passion in the sensuous emotion engendered of tense prayer to Christ and his mother, prostrate in her own room before her little prie-Dieu, or kneeling in church when the gaudily decorated holy building was all but empty and few worshippers interposed between her and the limp hero-god above the altar. Her prayer was a wild abandon rather than a beseeching or praying. But yes. For one person she had been brought up to pray—for her uncle and guardian and father in the Faith, Ignatius Darrel. Her prayers done, she resumed her normality.

Darrel in the wilds, lonely for his Master, agonized for a sight of the child he had left behind him. Long brooding made of him as true a fanatic as it had made of Moses. Reiteration of the articles of his faith indelibly stamped them into his soul. Christ was no longer a faith, but a fact, THE fact, the greatest fact of all. And lest thoughts of his sinfully-gotten offspring should estrange him from his Lord he whipped his flesh with whip of knotted wire. The secret austerities he practised tipped his natural eloquence with a white-hot fire that burned into the hearts of his heathen listeners and won them to Christ. And the greater the priest’s success the sharper grew his hunger for souls. And his superiors, while respecting his voluntary exile, planned to advance him high. The stark, flaming sincerity of his zeal was carried to Rome in the shape of new souls whose testimony amazed even the cold sanctitudes of the politicians in the Vatican. A cardinal’s hat was expected to become empty-headed, and the name of Ignatius Darrel was mooted. But the time was fast approaching when the craving to look once again on the child of his loins was to conquer whip and hair-shirt and even Christ. His one night of love he had bloodily erased from his memory—or imagined he had—but not the face of his child. She grew upon him in dreams of the night. Her face and form changed as changes a desert mirage, but, according to proverb, the more it changed the more it was intrinsically the same. And it was a madness, a torment hellish in its irritation not to know what her features now precisely were like. Little details, such as the colour of her eyes, he had actually forgotten. Were they blue like his own or black-brown like her—her mother’s? Was her chin dimpled—or smooth as his own? And her hair, it used to be—what? He had forgotten. And the priest felt a sort of insanity creeping over him. He wondered whether she ever prayed to him as he prayed to her—whether she ever prayed FOR him. . . .

Gradually Davy and Nora became friendly and intimate and casual—in their elders’ eyes. When the war broke out, Nora was in the last of her prescribed three years of business training. She would have left the school and sought a job at once, but Barnett decided in the negative. While she was concluding her course, Davy graduated with first class honours and relaxed at home after the strain of the finals. At a loose end, he devoted his idleness to Nora and fanned the spark of their love (proximity being a great match-maker) into quite a respectable (or disreputable) flame. He began to tease her with love-poems of which the following is an example:

The war at first left him cold, when it did not jar upon his sanity. He joined the Bunny Club, an association of kindred intelligentzia that included the most brilliant of London Jewry’s youth. The name Bunny was a malapropistic abbreviation of B’nei Yisroel, Children of Israel. And in a clubroom high up in W.C., the members vied with one another in forgetting the madness of the outer world by indulgence in admitted lunacies within. Some day the minutes of the Bunny Club may be given to the world. Sufficient for Davy that none unless certified a lunatic by an initiate might join. Davy as a poet had no difficulty. Dr. Phineas Rodman, the eminent physician and synthetic scientist, proposed him, a mad sculptor named Teddy Shlimozzel seconded him, and he became a Bunny and tried to forget the war. But the war would not allow itself to be put aside. Everywhere it obtruded, even into the Bunny Club, and Davy sought relaxation in teasing Nora and in falling in love with her.

4. NORMANDY

In Kew Road, Richmond, not far from the Botanical Gardens, and pleasantly close to the lovely stretch of Thames water, are many beautiful homes. Once on a time noble lords and ladies whose ancestors had come over with William the Conqueror’s scullion, preened their lives within these grey-stone mansions. ‘NORMANDY’ was just such a one, newly mahogany-stained and white-painted and green-railed and lawn-laid. From the lawn one might enter through the drawing-room windows that opened on the front veranda. So entered a young lady, after alighting from a passing bus. She found herself within the curtained bay and pushed through the curtains into a brand-newly decorated and furnished chamber of lordly dimensions. The young lady was bulky with fur coat, which, falling, revealed, her slender figure clad in short scarlet skirt and sweater-jumper of some silky fabric, finished off at respective ends by a little red cap, black-feathered, and black silk stockings and suède shoes to match, with medium scarlet heels. She let her handbag and a small parcel fall on an occasional table by Weeping and Willow’s and plucked at her gloves, pouted with her lips, frowned with her eyes and protested to the world as represented by Barnett Cohen’s drawing-room. Yes, the Cohens had at last made their exodus from the Lane to Kew—Hampstead was not select enough for the Clothing Contractor to His Majesty’s Forces. And the grumbling and protesting and pouting young lady, bound in rouge-et-noir, with big, blue eyes, flaxen bobbed hair and curiously unconventional olive beauty of face, was Miss Nora Darrel, as much part of the Cohen family as a Catholic shikseh could be.

The war had speeded her urge to independence. She wanted to be earning money. Not that she was kept short in any way. She knew quite well that her Darrel-guardian-uncle had amply provided for her, and Guardy Cohen was quite generous in his trust. And the richer Guardy Cohen became the more generous he was with her money. For of course it was her own money that provided her with her food and clothes and pocket-money. Sometimes she wondered wickedly how much Guardy Cohen was allowing himself for his paying guest, herself. Her clothes all came from one or other of his emporiums, west and east. And as for her pocket-money, she asked and received. But then she had no extravagances. Anyhow, when her Darrel guardian came back to England—as, from whispers at the convent with whose mother and sisters, she still kept up a kind of friendship and intimacy, she knew could now not be long delayed,—she supposed there would be some sort of a settlement. She often wondered—even when not praying—about this uncle of hers of whom she had only very dim memories; so dim that they were almost nothing. She knew—from these convent whisperings—that he was a great pillar of the faith. She had heard, too, about the cardinal’s hat—but, somehow, he meant little to her. If he meant anything at all, it was a shadow of a fear lest his homecoming might somehow sever her from Barnett and Sarah and Moses and—and Davy. But for the moment she was not thinking of these things. The drawing-room was vacant, and she could give vent to the grumble that yearned for utterance.

‘Holy Mary!’ the shikseh eased herself. ‘Eighteen shillings! Eighteen bob a week—for expert typing, shorthand, book-keeping and general etcet——’

‘I’ll give yer more’n that, Chucky!’ and a young man’s hands were on her shoulders.

David, it seemed, was determined that the war should not worry him. The Bunny Club took up frequent evenings. He had suggested to Nora that, under the circumstances, if she became engaged to him, it might be accepted by the committee as proof of insanity, and she could be admitted as a member. But she had declined—bluntly. He then suggested that her refusal might equally serve. And this evening was sure to be interesting. It was Unfriendly Night at the club, when each member had to be accompanied by an enemy. He thought if he tantalized her sufficiently she might be in a fit state to accompany him. So that when he saw her coming, he hid behind the hangings, and now he emerged. Slim and love-gay, in light-grey suit, clamant socks and dandy shoes, he stealthily pounced on his victim and, as from much practice, tilted back her head until their lips met. The Bunny Club was not in itself sufficient to distract his mind from the war. Nor did Zionism quite fill the gap. Sometimes, though, when Nora was kind, the war and the world were nowhere. But just now she would not be kind. She would not kiss back, and made a pretence of struggling.

But was it only a pretence? There was real trouble in Nora’s mind that she was dealing treacherously. All round. She was being dishonest with Guardy and Mums—Barnett and Sarah. She was being dishonest with her priest-uncle-guardian. She was being dishonest with her Faith. After all, David was a Jew, and no Catholic girl might marry a heretic—not even a Protestant, without special dispensation, much less a Jew, a member of the doomed race that had killed Christ. Often in her heart she sorrowed over the eternal unblessedness and after-pangs of Sarah and Barnett and Moses and—and David. Somehow Reb Zalman never had a place in those post-death forebodings. He was too remote, and she saw herself too much of an open riddle in his eyes for her to sorrow for his fate. There smacked impertinence in such thought. But the others were near to her. Her Christianity was deep-rooted, almost instinctive, implicit. These people who were so entangled in the web of her heartstrings must burn, while she, by accident of birth a child of the true faith, must live on in heavenly peace, aware through all eternity that her loves were burning. She would often get headaches trying to straighten the crooked; and nothing helped her so much as a passionate outburst before the Merciful Mother that She should intercede with Her Son on behalf of Sarah and Barnett and Moses and—and David. But most times, of course, she was just a girl, ready for life and love, unfolding into maturity. And when David caught her at such times, he was happy. He teased her and kissed her, and played at love with her and forgot that there was a mother and a father and a Moses and—somewhere—a Catholic priest with whom one day he would have to do battle for his heart’s desire.

5. LOVE-PLAY

‘David!’ protested the girl. ‘You mustn’t!’

‘No, no!’ he assured her with remorse catching at his throat as he repeated his crimes till, by a cunning twist and duck, she escaped from his arms and flamed at him.

‘Naughty, naughty!’ he chided her.

‘Pig!’ was all she could reply for the moment.

‘O!’ One could tell by his voice that he was hurt. ‘Look me straight in the nose. Now, d’you think that quite a kosher insult? I ask you. What would the Master say if he heard you call his great Jewish leader-elect—PIG? I ask you. Have a heart!’ He reached out his arms, but she ducked again.

‘I have,’ she retorted. ‘And I’ll keep it, thank you. You’d kiss me in front of the Master—wouldn’t you? And Guardy and Mums—how they’d jump for joy at their darling Davy’s idea of marrying a shikseh—eh? O! it’s——’

‘Not that,’ gravely assured her the young man. ‘What worries me is that you’re such a rotten cook!’ He was thinking of this evening’s Unfriendly Night at the Bunnies.

‘Liar!’ she replied in sisterly fashion. She was prouder of her cooking than of her shorthand and typing—with reason; and she could not brook his slander. She challenged him.

‘Who made the lockshen this shabbos?’ she demanded. ‘Did ums have to take castor-oil after my shtrudle—eh? And whom does Mums trust with the koshering of the meat when she’s busy—you? And, anyway, I taught Becky Jacobs how to make gefillté fish with grated carrot against her Ikey’s coming home on leave—ANYWAY!’

A great load seemed to tumble off David’s mind.

‘So that’s all right,’ he said. ‘Come on——’

‘There’s your birthday present,’ she evaded. ‘Behind you. Since you ARE a stay-at-home!’

Cattish that. But she was an English girl. Despite her country’s long defection from the true faith, England to her was England always, with a present prospect of reverting to the Church. In the convent and church rumours were abroad of a great missionary drive. Many Protestants, some of vast importance, had already been led back to the fold. That great body of Anglo-Catholics were said to be in secret negotiation with Papal representatives. Rumoured also that her own uncle—already a bishop somewhere in the Far East—might lead the drive. Again at the thought would crop up the fear that his arrival might raise even another barrier between her and David. O, it was all so complicated! But one vein of feeling was simple in her. Her love-leanings during these last few months had been disturbed by a trace of contempt that her momentary cattishness had revealed. In Nora’s eyes David was as English as herself. His country called, and he skulked at home, demanding from her a smoking cap like the one she had embroidered for his father, when he should have been reaching out for a helmet or cap of khaki. How brave and fine he would look in khaki! And at the back of her mind clouded an idea that somehow the uniform might obliterate race and religion between them. He would be a British soldier, and she a soldier’s lass—no more.

‘Miss,’ said David in brotherly fashion. ‘Don’t be a fathead.’

He reached behind him and took up the parcel from the occasional table by Weeping and Willow’s. He tore the string, unwrapped the article, and placed it jauntily on his head. Admired himself in the French-gilt mirror over the mantlepiece (queerly reminiscent of the crinkled-paper framed glass over the old kitchen-range). He put his pipe in his mouth and studied how it harmonized with the smoking cap. It didn’t. He put the briar back into his pocket and produced from somewhere a yellow meerschaum of German proportions. Yes, that went better. But he refrained from lighting it—not so much from patriotic reasons as from deference to his mother’s objections. He could smoke in the smoking-room or in the breakfast-room or in the dining-room or in his study or in his bedroom—but not in the drawing-room. As he preened himself, Nora relented.

Before dragging himself away from the embroidered glory of Nora’s gift, he gravely assured her: ‘I’ll stay at home and keep it nice and clean.’ He made as if to take an envelope out from his breast-pocket, then changed his mind. ‘Come on!’ he cried impatiently. ‘We’re wasting time!’ She permitted herself to be caught. He pulled her down beside him on the chesterfield, deftly plucked her hat from her flaxen curls, drew her arm about him, laid his cheek to hers, and—‘And now, Chucky Nora, let’s canoodle!’ he said.

They swayed forward and backward, murmured together the wordless saga of love as handed down to them from remotest time. Subtly the saga took to itself the form of the traditional refrain caught from the lips of his father and Moses and Reb Zalman, suitably modified to circumstances. In this way:

It was Davy who foolishly and overzealously spoilt the rhythm and broke the harmony. As a poet he should have known better. To punish him Nora swerved to her feet. Perhaps her hearing was keener than his. She stood stiffly facing the door, her back to the lad, and protested in a semi-severe, semi-sobbing whisper.

‘O! It’s no use—and—and I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!—and—and it’s all wrong; it’s wrong!’ Suddenly she turned and raged at him: ‘And don’t you ever dare to do it again!’ She turned her back again upon him and stood stiffly erect. David never thought of throwing half the blame back upon her. He loved her too well. Instead he fingered the official envelope in his breast-pocket and amusedly eyed the little scold’s back.

Nonchalantly he lounged to his feet, advanced a step, and placed the palms of his hand against her pinky little ears.

‘And what if I do do it again?’ he inquired in nervous tones.

‘You dare,’ came from between clenched pearlies, ‘—and—and I’ll tell Guardy!’

‘You wouldn’t do that!’ pleaded Davy, scared, and too faint to drop his hands.

‘See if I don’t!’ muttered back the girl in the fit of stubbornness. The difference between determination and stubbornness is that between a strong ‘will’ and a strong ‘won’t.’ David was determined, and easily succeeded—the poor girl had never learned ju-jitsu in convent—in twisting her round and outraging her lips and defying her threat.

‘Kiss—kiss—kiss—as hot as hell!

Kiss—kiss—kiss—now go and tell!’ Just in time he twisted her back again to face the opening door. As his father entered, he was calmly seated on the chesterfield, studying the notes he had made in his note-book for a contribution to that evening’s Unfriendly Night celebration at the Bunny Club, which, he now felt certain, Nora might attend. A poem was assigned to him—the subject given him being a culinary love-episode from a new triangle: The Love of Two Lockshen for One Kreple and Their Ultimate End in a Yawning Chasm. He had had some difficulty with the rhymes, as the corrections betrayed. Poems—alas! are not Minervas. And Poets are not Joves. ‘Thank God!’ should say their wives, actual or prospective.

Nora was not thanking God at all that moment. Not a bit. She was flushed and angry, with a stubborn look in her eye—no, eyes.

Barnett entered. He was rather corpulent and puffy. A velvet smoking jacket replaced the alpaca of less affluent days. He carefully finished the melody that had reached him as he approached the door before entering upon mundane matters. From the girl’s attitude he expected that her search for a job had not been over-successful. But it didn’t matter really. He had his own plans. Davy must have been chaffing her. He really must be given to understand that the girl must not be teased. He could not understand why Davy, so gentle otherwise, always took delight in teasing the girl, in finding fault with her cooking, for example, which was quite passable. Since Davy had come home from Cambridge and started teasing her, the girl was not her old self. He would have a talk with his son, and let him know once and for all that he must leave his father’s ward alone. Meanwhile—

‘Tri-BAM-im-bim BAM-im-bim BAM!—Nu, Nora? Anytink fresh to-day? Vhat you standing like dat for—ha? De backache you got—ha?’ David chuckled. With only one side of his mind was he seeking a better rhyme for locksh than—I’m afraid I forget. Barnett with his former comparative poverty had not lost his queer pawky humour. He was always reaching out for the cap-and-bells. Lately, though, his attempts had been costing him more effort. The war, at first assistant, had of late somewhat pressed heavily. Like all Jews in the country, Barnett had at first been eloquently confident of England. England? England was right, of course. England? England was all right—knew very well what it was about. Never mind! The Kaiser would be sorry yet. Never a thought on the waste, the inhumanity of it all, the futility. That is, at first. Then Barnett secured a large order for khaki coats, on whose subcontracting he made quite a little pile. Then the reports of the dead began to creep in, and Barnett and his like began to look askance at the drab cloth and feel that somehow they were being dragged into the responsibility of a huge moral bankruptcy. Conscience began to make cowards. They feared for England—began to feel a sullen, unspoken suspicion of civilization in general; and the like of Barnett hugged closer to the synagogue whence they had not too far strayed. Not like the young folk, who seemed to have been galvanized into a mania for pleasure, feverishly running to places of amusement, innocent and guilty. As though the war was destroying the sex-taboos. Why, take his own Davy. He had always preferred black or oxford-grey suitings, and now, for no reason at all, he had chosen to flare out in light-coloured worsted, meshiuggené ties and silk socks—silk! For no reason!

He noticed Nora’s birthday present on Davy’s head. He patted his own cap and pushed it a little further back on his bald scalp. A year ago she had embroidered it for him—to match his smoking jacket—his first bit of real gentlemanly luxury. She was very clever in the needlecraft she had learned from the convent sisters. She could make real Honiton lace and other flimsy fabrics that a mere man scarce considers worth the eyes’ blinding. The great padded roses on the drawing-room cushions were her work, too. As was the padded crinoline of the early Victorian lady who treated the telephone receiver like a naughty dame once treated Don Juan.

Barnett’s accent had not improved with the lengthening of his naturalized Englishry. A word as to the Jewish accent in general. In this respect English writers have curiously erred. Jews do not talk as if they had a perpetual cold. They do not lisp. The fault with the English Jew is that he talks and writes better English than the English Gentile. He refrains from taking the liberties that familiarity breeds the Gentile to take. He is self-conscious and elaborative, as, for example, Disraeli and Zangwill. The foreign Jew’s difficulties are mainly with the th and w. He may misplace the sh and ss. The diphthong ow may worry him. But from Thackeray and Dickens to the modern scribblers, this petty slander of the Jew’s alleged lisp has held sway. I wonder why.

Nora was accustomed to Barnett’s accent. So accustomed that she had ceased long ago to notice it. Even the yiddishisms with which his and Sarah’s English was so plentifully besprinkled, Nora accepted as current conversational coin. By now she herself possessed a working knowledge of Yiddish and, with her olive skin offsetting her flaxen hair and strangely blue eyes, might have passed as one in a crowd of young Jewesses. Few strangers but would have accepted her as racially part of the Cohen household.

As she prepared herself to twist Barnett’s question so that she might vent her stubbornness, there was more than ever a hint of non-Gentility in her angry features.

‘Vell?’ he prompted her.

‘I want to tell you, Guardy, that Dav——’

But here her voice trailed weakly to silence. She was not heroic or obstinate or stubborn enough to pronounce her love’s doom—and she side-glanced for assistance. David was quite ready.

‘Certainly.’ He smilingly stepped forward, waving his note-book and blandly agreeing. ‘Certainly. I do say, nor—’, giving himself a few seconds for thought, ‘nor have I any hesitation in reaffirming—er—here and now—er—yes! Eighteen shillings a week I do say is a miserable pittance to offer a trained expert typist, shorthand-writer, book-keeper and—er—general etcetera employee. Blarsted sweating—that’s what I corls it! Capitalist bloaters!’ And as in afterthought: ‘Why, she would be better off if she—er——.’ But here Davy’s voice also trailed off into silence. He, too, was not sufficiently heroic for revelation.

‘Not so much college langvage!’ admonished his father. ‘Shut opp! You tink you a B.A.M.A., you know everytink? You donnt! Praps you know less dan odders dat donnt know as much as you. Eighteen shillings a veek’s not so bad for a gell mitout any proper practical experience for a sta’t.’ And Barnett turned to the relieved girl. ‘Sit down, Nora, und donnt get excited. SIT DOWN!’

Davy slunk back to his note-book. Nora, quite unaffected by her guardy’s lungs, seated herself at the occasional table, Barnett expanded himself opposite her and smiled indulgently.

‘Und now let us talk de matter over in a cool, calm und businesslike fashion—ha? Tell me. Who are de millionaires vhat can afford to vaste eighteen shillings a veek on you commpany—ha? Rotchil’s—ha?’ This last with a grin of genial sarcasm.

‘No,’ Nora ignored the sarcasm. ‘Jones and Levinson, Ltd.’

Barnett leaped out of his chair and danced in horrified agitation at hearing the name of Levinson.

‘Vhat!’ he cried. ‘Dose tiefs! Dose scoundrels! Vhat! Vhat! YOU goin’ to be a snake in my bussim! You—YOU goin’ to help my blood-enemies against me! You! YOU! You who—who—you vhat I saved all de new pennies for—you! You vhat I paid for tree yerrs in de convent und took out und gave you a business education—und you—you—YOU goin’ to be a snake—a shlang! Oi gevald—gevald! (Help!) You——!!!’

The poor man was choking. He did not realize that in his sudden rage he had let loose upon the girl before him the startling realization of her utter dependence upon him for the last six years. This Levinson and he had for years been rivals both in business and in communal honours. And always Levinson had beaten him. Little wonder that the very possibility of his ward’s defection should drive him into apoplectic tendencies. Nora, white-faced, stared at his prancing. David groaned in his note-book for the girl’s disillusioning. Sarah from the kitchen heard her man’s outcry, and hurried out with a dubious glance at the new maids, of whose trustworthiness regarding kosher scruples she had her doubts. Her heavy approaching tread was heard in the silence of Barnett’s gaspings. With a fierce effort he was about to break out again anent the character of his ‘blood-enemy,’ when Sarah opened the door and panted:

‘Vhat’s de matter? Vhat’s de matter?’

The years had left their mark on Sarah. She was fat where once she had been but plump. Her yellow silk jumper was a little too tight for her ample upper. The calves she displayed were flesh-stockinged, and terminated in tight, high-heeled shoes over whose vamps her feet bulged fatly. Her eyes were heavy and sad, and her still tight cheeks were injudiciously powdered. Or perhaps she had been examining the flour-bin. But through the powder or flour burned spots of temper.

‘Barnett!’ she scolded. ‘Vot you shoutin’ for—de stommachache—no?’ She had grown refined during the years. ‘Und you—’ turning on Nora, ‘—vhat you make mine man angry for? I’m su’prise’ at you—no?’

Nora, pathetically indignant, defended herself, and so saved David, whose mother seemed so determined not to leave anyone out.

‘I didn’t do anything!’ the poor girl cried. ‘Emess! (’Struth!)’

‘Vhat!’ pranced Barnett a pas-seul as he regained his speech. ‘Vhat! Ha-ha! Didn’t do anytink!’ he mocked the girl. ‘Didn’t do anytink! Nottink—ha?’ he appealed to Sarah for sympathy. ‘You know vhat? Levinson—LEVINSON—dat mamser (illegitimate son of a gun) vhat bribed all de shool memberrs to vote against me for Varrden—for president—und she—SHE—dat shikseh—is going to dat goy—dat meshummed (apostate) Levinson und sell her sould for eighteen shillings a veek—Oi! I cannt hold out!’

David saw his opportunity, climbed on a chair and whined:

‘Sye, farver, Ah’ll dew the bloomin’ ouctioneering! Naah then, everybody! The next item on the prowgramme ’appens to be a sowl. Norrabootsowl. A sowl Ah wouldn’ pairt wiv ownly fer the syke av mi poor orphan pairents as wown’t let mi keep it. Naah then. Gowin’—gowin’—gowin’ fer eyeteen bob. Swelp me—eyeteen bob! Naah then, farver! Sye twinty—wown’t yer? Jist ter be gowin’ on wi’ the biddin’!’

‘Davy!’ scolded his mother in angry distress. ‘You get down from dat new silk chair und stop you nonsense—no?’ To her husband she turned mollifyingly. Since the war his temper had become uncomfortably uncertain. ‘You know vhat, Barnett? You could do mit anodder gell in de shop—in de office—no?’

David subsided. Barnett was disgusted. Just like Sarah to upset his little apple-cart. A long while he had decided on just that course of action, though he had not been unwilling that the girl should learn her actual value in the money market. And now he was deprived of the satisfaction of presenting his surprise.

‘Sarah,’ he snapped. ‘You must mix in! How many times didn’t I tolld you: Donnt mix in—ha?’

‘Alleright! Shah!’ deprecated his spouse. ‘Since ever you got dat gov’ment orrder you tink you a gantzer knacker (a swell)—no?’ She turned to the lad with a cunning, happy smile. ‘Davy! I got sommtink to show you—no?’

‘My birthday present? At present I’ve only got Nora’s on the brain—see, mother!’ Taking hold of her hand, he almost ran her out of the room in his eagerness both to see his mother’s present and to leave his father and Nora to the explanatory interview he realized was impending.

6. LESSONS

Barnett resumed his seat opposite his ward, and smiled apologetically. He was hoping devoutedly that she had not heard him aright.

‘You know,’ he began. ‘You know I’ve been vanting you all de time to comm into my office. Onnly I tought you vould tink I vas tinking to take de advantage over you, so——’

‘O Guardy! I wouldn’t dream——’

‘Off coss. If you dream in my office you get de sack, ha?’

‘O Guar——’ Guardy thumped the table.

‘Who’s talkink—you or me—ha?’ Nora subsided. Barnett continued. ‘Nu, if I gif you more’n eighteen shilling a veek for a——’

‘O Guardy! I’ll——’

‘Donnt promise, den I vonnt be sorry. How much is two-und-a-half pretzent on eighteen shillings a veek—ha? Qvick!’

‘Two and a half per cent?’ repeated Nora, a bit dazed.

‘Ainglish scholar!’ sneered Barnett. ‘Vould you like a roll vallpaper und a gross blackleads—ha? I not been to convent und—terrty-tree shillings!’ He stared triumphantly at the bewildered girl, who tried to repeat his unconventional total.

‘Thirty——’ But he disposed of her agnosticism with a thump—on the table, shouting:

‘Who’s boss—you or me—ha?’

But Nora had been doing some recollecting, and she now tried to rise as she ventured nervously:

‘O! I forgot—I really can’t—really—I——’

‘Sit down! SIT DOWN!’ She was overwhelmed. ‘If you tink you’ll get more—donnt tink.’ But Nora still tried to speak, and her fingers twined in a devil’s embrace.

‘O! I——’ she managed to say when he concluded for her—

‘Vant to go to Jones und Levinson—ha? Dose tiefs—dose——’

‘O Guardy—please——’ she certainly had staying power.

‘Und vhen—’ Barnett wilfully ignored her meaning. ‘Und vhen you—er—you guardian comms back, vhere vill he find you—ha? At Jones und Levinson (thump), ha? Dose tiefs (thump), ha? Dose——’

‘No! No! No!’ the girl stood up and almost shrieked in his face. ‘You know what I mean! Please! Please! Why did you let me think my guardian was paying for me all these years? Please! Please! You must tell me. All. You must let me—pay you back—somehow—please! O! I must know the truth. Guardy darling—please——’

Barnett made a last effort at prevaricating.

‘Oi, limmelonn! So long I been in de tailorin’ line—und she vants de trut’! Every lady cosstommer I tell she’s beautiful—’

But Nora had staying power, and Barnett at last gave in.

‘Oi, alleright. I’ll explain. Onnly donnt interrupt. You praps remember about fife—six—seven yerrs ago, reading in de paperrs of de big Barrow Bank smash. Vell, you—you guardian is I’m sure a very fine priest, but—’xcuse me—a rotten business man. De monney he put in dat bank farr you vas plenty alleright—but de divi after de smash vas about two und a haf pretzent in de pound. Nu? Vell? Oi, shut opp! Vhat you vant? You got a job, und you can arrange mit Mums for board und lodgings—und yes, I know vhat you vant to say—me you can pay off sixpence a veek—nu—ha?’ He glares at Nora, who suddenly reaches over and kisses him.

‘How good you’ve all been! But—but what a lot I owe you!’

‘Nu,’ suggested Barnett, forgetting to frown. ‘Call a crediterrs’ meeting—ha?’ Nora tried to say something. ‘Shut OPP! Here’s a pencil und here’s Davy’s nottbook und sta’t vorrk. Take down in sho’thand as follows:’ Nora wonderingly obeyed and Barnett dictated. ‘Dear mister Levinson, Vonce a man called Koirach (Korah) vent to hell mit all his monney. He now lends it out at two-und-a-haf pretzent. If you vant any monney, go to Koirach. Yours truly, Barnett Cohen, Gov’ment Contracterr.’ Nora looked up. ‘Vhat! Don’ it already—ha? Und you can onnderstand all dose—dose—’ and he illustrated dots and dashes with his forefinger. Nora nodded. ‘Vonnderful! You made a great improvement since I engaged you. You can haf a sixpence rise—SHUT OPP!’

Nora was now thoroughly cowed, and shut up without a word, while Barnett apostrophized the electric chandelier:

‘Oi de vomen! Oi de vomen! I ask you. Vhy do vomen talk so much—ha?’

Followed more sedately by Sarah, David burst in upon the scene, wrapped in a full-size, pure silk tallis, a prayershawl that had come, through the agency of Moses, all the way from Palestine.

The tallis or, more properly, tallith, was in olden time the Hebrew toga. Full-sized, in wool or silk, its barrings of blue still retain an æsthetic value that is missing from the narrower scarf-like modernities affected largely at present. The artistic side of Davy’s nature luxuriated in the dignity of the gift’s ample folds and decorative barrings. He saw out of the corner of his eye that the lesson had been demanded and given, and that all was well. Turning about, the excited rogue seized hold of his re-entering mother and whirled her indecorously round the room.

‘Darling,’ he sang. ‘Darling! Darling! Darling mother darling! Darling! Darling! One—two—three!’ and the rest of the improvised waltz to the traditional Tri-BAM-im-bim melody till his mother stumbled breathless, and he set her down on a chair near the cabinet.

Sarah’s smile left her lips as her breath came back to her body. Instinctively her hand went out to the glass cover that sheltered two parts of a pink-and-white porcelain atrocity.

‘Aie!’ she sighed. ‘Und if Leah de baby had lived she vould haf been tvelf und a haf und a comferrt to me in de day!’

‘But, Mammy,’ David tactlessly protested and opened his mother’s eyes while Barnett echoed her sigh. ‘Nora’s been——’ He stopped, realizing his false move. Sarah darted at him a quick look.

‘Ah, yes,’ she quietly agreed and turned her eyes to the girl. ‘You been a good gell, Nora. A good gell. Come here, Nora.’

Nora came, aware that the eyes of Davy’s mother were opened, and knelt at her feet. Sarah fondled her flaxen curls.

‘You bin to confession to-day—no?’ Nora nodded silently.

‘Dat’s right. Und you little cross mit “from you fader” scratched on it—you not left it again in de badroom—no?’ Nora without speaking drew it out from her bodice and held it up and put it back again. ‘You fader must haf put it on vhen you vas a little chil’ like—never mind, Nora. Onnly you see—you balong to de cross—no, Norelé? Understand?’ The lesson was over. The girl rose.

Climatic, environmental, occupational and other influences have played havoc with the Jewish physiognomy, but always in moments of crisis the Jewish strain shows itself. Shows itself through the super-imposed Slav and Teutonic and Celtic overlays. And when in silence Nora rose from her knees, an intentness crept upon the Cohen household. And upon all four faces declared itself the centuries-overlain Hebraic strain.

7. IKEY CALLING

The tension was broken by the cries of a newsboy without. ‘Spesh’ll! Speshull! Heavy British losses! Speshull! ’Shull!’

Davy disappeared in the bay and returned with a damp sheet. For purveyors of tidings good or bad business was brisk those days. The man in the street was become an international politician and a geographical student. In the lesser synagogues, in the Shtiebels, Jews old and young and middle-aged assembled before evening prayer and listened—not without heckling—to some superior tactician. Battles were fought over and over again with varying results over thousands of Jewish tables. If only Kitchener and all the other powers that were could have benefited by lessons from these stove-strategists! As the war expanded, learned scholars dubbed it boldly the war of Gog and Magog, preliminary to God’s redemption of his people Israel.

Anxiously the other three awaited a word from David as he unfolded the sheet and glanced down the latest list of casualties. From his lips at last issued a low whistle.

What was it that, in those early days before conscription, made the buds of England blossom into eager challengers of the scythe? There were those who went out for the pure adventure and gamble and excitement of the thing. There were those who went because they had nothing else or nothing better to do. There were those who went because they feared being called cowards. There were those who went because of the lie manufactured to sting them—the lie of ‘the contemptible British army.’ There were those who went because they were driven by their employers, by their women folk or by their relatives and friends. And there were those that went because a friend, a chum, a kinsman had already gone and been killed by the enemy; and a blind unreason compelled them to throw arguments for and against to the winds and, without any hatred against the other side, to take the dead man’s place.

A while David stood, one hand holding the paper, the other fumbling in his breast-pocket. He had ceased looking down the column. He no longer even re-read the name of the dead man. His still pursed-up lips were not whistling. His face in that minute had changed, had become older. David Jacob Cohen had reached manhood.

‘Nu?’ demanded Barnett and voiced the general unease. ‘Vhy donnt you say sommtink—ha?’ David’s silence frayed the nerves of all three. He laid the paper down on the corner of the chesterfield, removed his tallis and laid it on the paper, doffed Nora’s gift, too, and laid it carefully on the tallis. And then he spoke.

‘Mary!’ he called, and then reminded himself to ring the bell. But it was not necessary, for just then the maid opened the door and announced Mr. Moses. Moses held out his hand to the lad with a smile of congratulation, not unmixed with a queer sad severity.

‘Many happy returns of the day, Davy.’

‘Thanks,’ replied David rather curtly. He almost released his hand from that of Moses and, before the maid could retire, called her back.

‘A minute, Mary. Take this letter to the post—at once, please—and let me know as you come in. At once. Thank you.’

The maid took from him the large envelope and, something in his voice and look constraining her, went straight out to the pillar-box a hundred yards from the gates, without even a ‘Yessir.’

Moses sensed something amiss both in the look and voice of David and in the general atmosphere. Moses had aged. His lower lip fell often into an unguarded droop. But his eyes had somehow not aged. If anything they were younger, brighter, eager. Just now they turned instinctively to the shikseh. He went up to her while Davy was speaking to the maid, and while Sarah sat still and waiting, and while Barnett searched feverishly for the paper under the tallis. Moses went up to the shikseh and handed her a bundle of papers. In the last decade he had become a leader in Zionism.

‘My Zionist speeches somehow look more convincing after you’ve typed them, Nora,’ he said. ‘And this is important. Extremely important. When the powers gather round to make peace, I demand that the Jewish nation shall be represented. One day, I shall name my choice. Meanwhile——’

But Nora put the script in her lap and scolded the old man.

‘You’re simply awful, Master! How often have I told you you mustn’t dare come out yet without your woollen waistcoat? Whatever SHALL I do with you?’ Her affection for him puzzled her. Just as his affection for the shikseh puzzled him. As they looked into each other’s eyes, the problem of their affection seemed to bring them closer as though with an incomprehensible physical pull. Nora welcomed the tug. Moses, in the midst of an indulgent smile, felt the urge to withstand it. He turned away from her, nor turned back though he sensed her disappointed sigh. No. She would learn soon enough her bitter lesson. Her wiles could not—must not prevent him from doing that which would wound her—perhaps leave her maimed all her life.

8. THE RECRUITING SERGEANT

As Moses turned away from the shikseh, David coughed deliberately. Nora stared at him, even Moses forgotten. Sarah tensed. Barnett stopped fussing for the paper, and Moses was aware of his drooping lip and weakening legs. He put his hand on the back of a chair and steadied himself. He looked into David’s eyes; they were the eyes of the potential leader of Israel, hard, grim. They needed only be also sad and lonely. But that, too, would come.

‘You all knew Ikey Levinson?’ said David slowly. At the fatal past tense the spacious drawing-room of NORMANDY seemed full of the flutter of the black angel’s wings. David took pains to bring the identity of the individual named home to each. Ikeys and Levinsons like Davids and Cohens were common in Israel.

‘Jones and Levinson,’ he explained to his father. ‘Becky Jacobs’ cousin and chosson (fiancé),’ he explained to the women. ‘One of our old boys,’ he explained to the Hebrew-teacher.

Barnett breathed heavily. Sarah slowly began to sway forward and backward. Moses trembled and tried to draw himself taut.

‘Nu? nu? NU?’ Barnett at last managed to voice hoarsely the gloomy unease, ‘Nu? Gorn! Vhy donnt you say sommtink—ha—ha?’

‘Killed.’ David’s voice was harsh, quite unlike his boyish baritone, but quite steady.

‘Boruch dayan emess! (Blessed be the true Judge!)’ groaned Barnett. Sarah swayed backward and forward. Nora sat very still.

‘Boruch dayan emess!’ whispered Moses and began to have an inkling that his services as recruiting sergeant were unnecessary.

‘Boruch dayan emess!’ almost mocked David. He had heard of a Ukranian rabbi who had torn down the curtain from the Ark in the synagogue, and publicly arraigned God for His treatment of His people. David felt closely akin to the Ukranian rabbi.

‘Blessed be the true Judge!—eh?’ he translated for Nora. ‘Good old Ikey!’

‘His onnly boy!’ lamented Barnett for his ‘blood-enemy.’ ‘Soch a ting to happen to Levinson! Soch a good man—und not to haf a son left to say kaddish for him! Oi!’

The kaddish (sanctification) was originally instituted as an extended form of ‘Blessed be the true Judge,’ to be recited at public prayer by the mourner as confessing God in sorrow just as in joy. In it is no mention of death. It is a pure hymn of praise. In time, stark Jewish superstition-justice claimed a meed of penance for all. For there is no righteous man on earth who doeth good and sinneth not. But superstition-mercy limited the purification by hell-fire of even the wickedest to twelve months. Superstition-politeness prevented the utmost measure; and eleven months of purgatory became the generally accepted measure of post-death suffering. By juxtaposition, the kaddish degenerated into a kind of Romish mass, powerful to cool the flames of hell; and for good or ill the last stronghold of Judaism in hearts otherwise assimilated and indifferent. Did I say ‘for good or ill’? I should have said ‘for ill.’ For with such a powerful superstition-complex, Judaism, to the ignorant and assimilated, bears a dangerous similarity to the death-cheating cult of Christianity.

Barnett in religious matters was quite unsophisticated. He accepted the general consensus of opinion nor weighed pros and cons. To him, like to millions of Jews, the deprivation of a son who would recite the kaddish was the greatest misfortune. Therefore, as well as for the bereavement itself, Barnett bemoaned Levinson of Jones and Levinson, Ltd. Sarah found her voice too.

‘Oi veh!’ she wailed softly. ‘Oi veh is mir! Onnly not long ago engaged to Becky Jacobs—nebbich (pity!) He had no mudder to stop him—vhy didn’t SHE stop him? Vhy didn’t his fader stop him? Oi veh! HIS business to go und kill Gerrmans! Gerrmans not got Becky Jacobses like him—no? Oi veh!’ and she swayed forward and backward.

One wonders whether after all Sarah, with her higher feminine-maternal intelligence, did not then touch with unerring finger the cancerous root of the whole damned thing. Did a single volunteer go for any other purpose than to kill? Certainly not to be killed. Life is so cocksure. As cocksure as Barnett, in order to preserve his marital superiority, had to pretend to me, though inwardly he agreed with his Sarah.

‘Oi, my life,’ he reprimanded her mildly. ‘You onnly a voman! You donnt understand! Politics!’

‘Donnt I?’ Sarah tearfully protested. ‘Vould OUR DAVY be soch a fool und leave his fader-mudder und go und be killed—ha?’

David drew Nora’s eyes to his and then turned his own on her birthday gift. She saw his lips twitch in a queer smile and suddenly regretted the ‘stay-at-home!’ she had flung at him—only a little while ago.

Barnett, though he had confirmed his essential man-superiority over Sarah, was not comfortable. The ensuing silence tore at his nerves. There was something in the air more than Ikey Levinson’s passing. He didn’t like the smile he caught on his boy’s hardened features. He didn’t like the way the boy was now looking at Moses. Barnett fidgeted, fumed silently and breathed hard.

Moses looked back into the boy’s eyes. He had come with the intention of goading the lad into the shambles. It was just the experience that, if it did not annihilate him, would fit him to be a leader of Israel. That and one other thing. David was by nature too happy to be a leader in Israel. A happy leader was an impossible anomaly. He was bright and clever and romantic and enthusiastic, but only sorrow and loneliness could give a man strength. He knew that from his own life. Death and worse had separated him from his loves and had made him sorrowful and strong; but too late for him to be more than a teacher, a Hebrew-master, a fashioner, at most, of the real leader that should come after him. Such a one might David be. But he must be made sorrowful and lonely. The war would sow in his young heart the quick seed of his people’s sorrow; and the inevitable ultimate separation of the young Jew and the shikseh would add the wanting loneliness. And when the time came for a Jewish leader to represent the renascent Jewish nation—at the round table at which the powers would one day be compelled to foregather—David would be there, young, brilliant, sorrowful, lonely, strong.

It was for this he had come. Looking into the lad’s eyes, he knew that Ikey Levinson had anticipated him. He waited.

‘Master,’ said Davy. ‘This morning I had an offer of a commission from the University—?’

Pride and fear hunted one the other over the olive face and strangely blue eyes of the flaxen-haired shikseh. Barnett clenched and unclenched his fists. Sarah would not admit that her pleading was belated though a foreboding was upon her. She ran tremblingly and caught her only child by his left sleeve—she remembered afterwards that it was his left sleeve—and whimpered:

‘Oi, Davy! Dovid’ll mein kind! Vhat you say! Leave fader-mudder un—donnt say soch foolish tings! You—you frighten me, Dovid’ll! Dovid’ll! I’m already an olld voman—vait a little—till I’m dead und gone und you married mit little children of y’ronn—und you vonnt talk such foolishness—no?’

And the silly old mother crouched down by the erect figure of her boy and pressed her face against his sleeve—his left sleeve—and left a floury, powdery patch.

‘There, there, Mammy—don’t worry! You don’t suppose—’ he laughed—‘they’ll keep the war going all that time—eh?’

He could not help laughing as he patted his mother’s trembling shoulder. Barnett sensed youth’s cruelty and no longer could restrain himself. He leaped out of his chair and shouted:

‘Ye-es! You tink dat if onnly you join, de var vill be over in fife—ten—minutes—ha? You tink you bin to college und sqvandered you fader’s monney you can do everytink? Snottynose! Tink dey cannt do mitout you—ha? Look on him! An officer—ha? Vhat fader-mudder—vhen fader-mudder? Nottink—ha? A sword—a revolverr—a hoss—Hurrah—ha? For vhat? For vhen? For to kill everybody—ha?—(thump-thump) HA?—Meshuggé de volld since de Chinese!’

‘The Chinese, father?’ asked David vaguely, meek under the lash of his father’s tongue.

9. THE PHILOSOPHY OF A MIDDLING JEW

The greatest of all sciences is psychology. To some it is given without speech to trace another’s thought. The gift is sometimes shared by husband and wife, by two old friends smoking by the fireside on a winter night—rarely by son and father. David was puzzled by his father’s tangentical allusion; but, in fact, it was quite apposite and relevant to the matter in hand. England—Europe generally—was reaching out to snatch from him his son—his kaddish, and Barnett was ready to hate this England and Europe generally and all that belonged to them. He wanted in his son’s presence to cast down their high-and-mighty assumption of excellence that he imagined to be the lure that was drawing him. Ostentatiously he always had the English newspapers on his table, but in the privacy of his office he still enjoyed the Yiddish Press of London and of New York. Its news might be stale but its tit-bits were very informative and quotable.

‘ “DE CHINESE, FADER?” ’ mocked Barnett. ‘Yes. YES! De Chinese! Tink you olld fader not been to college knows nottink—ha? Never mind—from de Americaner gazetten vone can also lerrn somtink—never mind! Tell me, M.A.B.A.B. fool, who ferrst vas clever enoff t’ invent gunpowder ferrst—ha? De Chinese—no? ha? Und vhat for, I ask you—ha? I tell you vhat for. For children for fireverrk—nice bang-bang—de children like it—ha? Vhy not? Comms meshuggené Europ und says: Vhat fireverrk? vhen fireverrk? Better guns, cannons—BANG! a hundred Ikey Levinsons smashed—BANG! anodder hundred Ikey Levinsons smashed—ha?—HA? Again. I’m not yet findished. Who ferrst invented flying ferrst—ha? Again de Chinese—mit deir kites for babies and children to play mit—ha? Vhy not? Hooh! look at de kite! Hooh! look at de kite! Nice—no? ha? Comms meshuggené Europ und says: Hooh! look at de aeroplane! Hooh! look at de tzepplin! Vhat kite! vhen kite! Better bomb-bomb-BOMB on men und vomen und children und all odder kinds of fools—ha? Say! Tzivilization—education—college—all de whole damn lot not vorrt a rotten egg!’

And Barnett sat down and fidgeted and got up and sat down to fidget again, and Sarah looked furtively round her son towards Moses. No. There was no comfort in the Master’s face. Nevertheless she could but try.

‘Mr. Moses—’ she whined, and Barnett jumped at the cue.

‘Yes!’ he cried. ‘Vhy donnt you tell him, Master, to stop all dat foolishness—ha? Vhenever he never vould listen to his fader-mudder, allvays he listened to you—no? ha?’

And Sarah followed with pitifully cunning flattery.

‘Vhat a teacher you vas, Mr. Moses! Und vasn’t my boy you best scholar—no? Vhy—’ the poor mother argued more with God than with the little old man whose eyes never left her boy’s face. ‘Vhy should he go und be killed—vhy? Tell him, master, tell him—please!’

Moses opened his lips to speak. He tried to keep firm his weak lower lip. His mouth was parched, his throat arid and no sound came. He waited a moment to get stronger. The truth was he was a bit afraid of the parents Cohen. Not so much of Barnett. In crises the Barnetts are more voluble than the Sarahs. They oppose vociferously onslaughts of lower creation. Their outcry reveals a certain pride in the consciousness of their higher humanity. Conquerors or conquered, in them mankind found defence. To the Barnetts the war was such an onslaught of inferior creation. After resisting thousands of years of persecution, their race was committed to life and to defence of life, in fact as in theory. The rabbi himself—nay the whole Law—gave way to the physician—to life. Yes, die rather than deny God—die rather than murder—die rather than seduce another’s wife. All otherwise live—no matter the cost or penalty of life.

Barnett’s vociferation revealed this comforting superiority-complex. No matter what happened this would remain with him and be assistant to him. But Sarah had been quieter than Moses had expected. Hers was no gladiatorial pose against fate. Though deep down in her lurked a perceptible Hebraic sanity-strain to oppose the Gentile blood-lunacy, yet was she body and soul no more than a mother—without question even of animal-human differentiation. And Moses feared the reaction of Sarah’s primitive maternalism against which David’s decision—in which he himself was morally participant—was sheer unnatural heresy. He felt himself stronger. He could let go of the chair, and his hands of themselves groped out to the lad, and his voice seemed to speak of itself, too.

David saw the hands of Moses groping out to him and stumbled towards his old teacher and bowed his head and felt the trembling fingers rest in blessing and heard the sad voice.

‘David—my Davy!’

‘Master—master!’ he stammered and cried like a child.

Moses was not a little old man now. His eyes stared upward unseeingly and his voice rang with the pain and hope of all the world. And Barnett and Sarah were hushed, and the shikseh’s heart ached and tugged and quivered with strange unreason.

‘How long have we cried our Sh’ma Yisroel! Hear O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is one! How long will we yet have to cry Sh’ma Yisroel! Sh’ma Yisroel! before mankind cries back: Hear O Lord—Mankind Thy People—Mankind is One! How long O God shall your poor Jew have to suffer and lead—suffer and teach! O David, my Davy! Our God and the God of Mankind calls you to go down into the tragedy of His people. If you do not come back, then—then the Lord gives and the Lord takes away—blessed be the name of the Lord! But you will come back. Not as you go; without your youth; without your laughter. Perhaps in their place you will bring back an icy brain, an iron heart and a lonely soul. Go and come. Your work will be waiting. Blessed be thou in thy going out and blessed be thou in thy coming in. The Lord bless you and guard you. The Lord cause His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his face to you and give you peace.’

The trembling hands slid down from the lad’s head to his cheeks. Moses kissed his pupil and suddenly crumpled up into a chair and shrank back into a little old man again. David straightened himself and did not feel the tears streaming from his eyes. Barnett paced up and down the room like a caged beast. Nora wept silently into the script in which she had buried her face, and Sarah relaxed with a wretched sob.

‘Oi! Oi!’ she gulped. ‘Vhat haf I lived to see! Vhat haf I lived to see! My onnly chil’ going avay from me! My onnly chil’! My onnly chil’!’

Davy’s eyes cleared and he remarked Nora’s secret crying. His heart sang in him a song of dalliance. It was for him she was crying. So she understood and—and—she wasn’t fit to accompany him to-night to the Bunnies’ Unfriendly Night! The humour of it struck him and brought hysterical laughter to his lips. He tried to keep his lips shut, but the laughter forced its way out and rang weirdly in the tense atmosphere. He choked it back with an apologetic cough. His father halted in his cage-tramp and glared at him. When his son’s coughing ceased he turned his glare on the shrunken little old man in the chair.

‘Vhy you do dis?’ Barnett snarled at him. ‘For vhat? For who? For Aingland? You tink so much of you Aingland? Und Sarah—me? Nottink—ha?’

Scratch the ‘proper Ainglishman’ and you find the Jew. But was Barnett really as naïve as all that—or was it that he was seeking to set up a more tangible target for his anger than the shadowy, almost immaterial, almost inhuman idealism of the Master to which he could indefinitely sense his son was being sacrificed? A shadowy Moloch of the little Hebrew teacher’s projecting, too elusive to be attacked. England was also a Moloch, but not so shadowy and better serving for vent of anger.

Moses felt tired as if virtue had gone out of him, but he answered Barnett gently and endeavoured, while tacitly admitting his moral complicity in David’s going, to trace some of the threads that went to the web of his intentions.

‘I think not of you alone. I think of all the Jews who have found in this England the freedom and equality other lands still deny us. Are you not foolish, Cohen, to throw at me my Englishry? Am I more English than you because I happened to be born here? Where a Jew is born is only an accident—sometimes a fatal accident. You come from Russia. My people from Amsterdam. To that place they came from Spain. To Spain they came from Morocco—from the north coast of Africa—from Alexandria in Egypt where they had fled from the Babylonian conqueror with Jeremiah the prophet. When a child I used to pronounce my Hebrew in the old s’phardi way. But what does it matter? Your people came to Russian-Poland from Germany—from Italy—Rome after the second temple had fallen. Your people the captives that graced the triumph of Titus. What does it matter? We Jews must live as we can till we live to go back. When we die too much in one land we fly to another. Where we are allowed to live we must be grateful and we must show our gratitude—even at the cost of our children. What cares the world—what cares England for the private tragedy of the Jew in the firing line? If we held aloof now—if our children held aloof—the toleration here under which we are recouping would swiftly give way to a persecution the more terrible as the more apparently just. Consider this, Cohen. Consider the Russia you left and the England that received you, and let Davy go.’

But Barnett, having set up his target, was not to be cheated of his arrows. In his mind rose up the Russia that Moses—without personal experience—had evoked; its blood-libels and its pogroms; its drunken priest-egged moujiks sating their blood-lust on some Jewish hamlet; and the Jew in him cried out, and charged the whole world, England included, with his blood—shed sufficient to stain the whole map red.

‘No! no!’ he cried. ‘I say No! De qvarrel is not ours! De neutrality of Belgium—ha? For how many yerrs has OUR neutrality been broken—und ourselves mit it—und vhy did no Aingland fight for us—ha?’

‘England——’ Moses interrupted in defence, but Barnett shouted him down.

‘Aingland!’ he mocked. ‘Aingland has been very good to de sheeny—ha? Tank you, Aingland, for not merrdering us—tank you—tank you! Vould you like to take our brains? You’ve taken dem. Vould you like to take our knack for business? You’ve taken it. Mitout de Jew, Aingland, you vould still haf been vearing you great-grandfader’s overcoat—an heirloom—ha? Ve brought you trade—you take de credit? Orright! Monney-lending? You und America are de biggest monney-lenderrs in de volld. Never mind. A little more trade—a little more monney-lending—a little more internatzional business—und killing of people vonnt pay und vars vill be no more—tanks to de Jew—ha? Vell? Vhat you vant? Take everytink—everytink! But my Davy—NO!’ and a thump on the occasional table by Weeping and Willow’s put an end to the matter, in Barnett’s mind.

‘Cohen,’ tried Moses again timidly. Barnett bullied:

‘Yes. You can say to Davy, Go!—ha? You got no children! Davy not YOUR son—ha?’ Immediately the bully felt compunction. Moses winced. His latent grief was that he had no son. Of late the memory of his daughter’s treachery had haunted him less of nights. But—a son his, and he would have had no need to seek beyond his own loins for a leader in Israel. David, too, saw the Master wince, and suddenly a memory of the morning came to him and he laughed a jolly, humorous laugh that almost infected the other four into partaking of his merriment.

‘No, no, father, I won’t have you slander the Master. He—he—he vol-unteered! O my! O my!’

A flush stole over the face of Moses as if he had been found out in a dishonourable deed. David laughed and spluttered.

‘Dave Cohen from Jesus——’

‘From vhat?’ Barnett, in the midst of a sympathetic smile, cried out, startled.

‘From Jesus College at Cambridge, father. Dave Cohen with his own eyes——’

‘Tell me,’ interrupted Barnett, a glint of humour in his still angry eyes. ‘Tell me. Is dere anodder Cohen dat vas soch a fool as to get married und haf a scamp off a David like me—ha?’ But David turned the tables.

‘Yes, father,’ he agreed quietly. ‘His people have taken the house opposite and will be moving in in the summer. But what I wanted to explain was that he was there when the Master came to volunteer. I believe he even offered to take off his beard. Only the medical officers kicked him out and——’

Barnett was afraid, suddenly, of being side-tracked, and startled poor Nora with the resounding finality of his fist on the table.

‘NO!’ he shouted. ‘Und dat settles it.’

‘I’m sorry, father,’ very humbly spoke David. ‘But I wrote accepting the commission and—and——’

‘Shveig!’ shouted his father as though by shouting him down he could call ‘Halt!’ to the inevitable. ‘Shveig! not anodder vorrd!’

The maid knocked and opened the door, and said:

‘The letter’s posted, master David.’

The door closed after the maid, and for a moment no sound could be heard in the room. Barnett stood stock still staring at his son as at a stranger. Nora’s olive cheeks reddened and paled in quick succession. Subconsciously to Moses’ lips rose the old tri-BAM-im-bim refrain. Suddenly Sarah drew the attention of all by slipping sideways in an endeavour to rise.

David quickly had his arm round her.

‘It’ll be all right, Mammy!’ he petted her. But she pushed him weakly away and called with her eyes to the shikseh. Nora hurriedly dropped Moses’ speech and ran up to her and bent over her and put her young arms about her and kissed her and helped her up and listened to her as she muttered:

‘His clo’s—de offitzerr’s clo’s, Nora. Must get his clo’s ready—no?’

And the women left the men to themselves. The three stared at one another. There was nothing to say and, being only men, they said nothing. Till at last Barnett to the four walls suggested:

‘P’raps dey’ll take me as a shpetz’ll constable—ha?’

1. GOD’S FOOLS

DAYS of bereavement. Gentile mourners had their comfort. Divine comfort. Their sons died for God Whose name now was FOR KING AND COUNTRY as once it was MOLOCH or ASHTORETH.

Primitive belief in the potency of names has its roots in the human system. God is great. Than God-names nothing is greater. Not always is the name of God spelled in letters. Sometimes in wood or stone. Sometimes in animal or man. Sometimes in coloured calico. Heathenism repeats itself. The names of God become themselves very gods and demand and obtain sacrifices. Moloch has accepted our son! Great is Moloch!

The bereaved idolaters go home to dinner, divinely comforted.

But the Jew? From old experienced, he guesses the priests in Moloch’s belly, recognizes the ventri-loquistic sounds outroaring from the image’s gaping jaws, string-pulled. He has just prayed: And the Lord shall be King of all the earth; on that day God shall be one and His name one! He has known God, how can nominal deistic pluralities affect him? In olden time God tested him. Take thy son, thy only one, whom thou lovest, and offer him up. . . . He had been ready to obey. God set him a severer test. Stretch not forth thy hand against the lad. . . . Also obeyed. Having once heard God, how might he be affected by the image’s belchings? And yet was he compelled to surrender his son, his only one, whom he loved, to the fires of the idol. Can one expect him also to shout Hurrah! with the heathen? All else. He will laugh with the Gentile, do business with him, practise all the sins and virtues with him, even—in these lax days—eat with him. But when he mourns, the Jew mourns alone. God’s fool.

Reb Zalman was expounding the Zohar to one or two select disciples, and he said: God and the nations and his own self came together to make an almighty fool of the Jew. The nations shall pass away. One day God and the Jew, Eternals both, will meet face to face with none else by and shall say Shalom! to each other and come to an understanding.

Meanwhile, in the midst of the Gentiles, the Jew mourned alone. And the sound of his mourning went up from tenements in Whitechapel and mansions in Kew.

A Hebrew scribe once roamed in London’s ghetto. Played tick round the stalls in the Lane. Raised his cap when his teacher Mr. Moses and his little Rachel sauntered him by. Sampled at odd festive-days Sarah’s sponge cake and raisin wine. Spent odd pennies given to him by Barnett, with the ear-locked pedlar of home-made sweets by the school railings. Still in his mouth lingers the taste of the treacle toffee done up in farthing ounce-papers. As he grew up he became a disciple of the Rabbi of the shtiebel, a colleague in Zionism of the master, a fellow-member with Davy of the Bunny Club, a reserved admirer of Nora and an infrequent visitor in Normandy. Infrequent only because he willingly yielded David priority in the shikseh’s affections.

The reader is told this that he may the more readily credit the actuality of the thinly disguised dramatis personæ. Darrel, too, the scribe knew—quite well. Nor was surprised to read in the newspapers that the Pope in secret consistory had appointed Father Darrel, Archbishop of China, to be a newly-created Cardinal. They say that the Cardinal, who is now almost an old man, is expected to succeed to the Triple Crown. Well, according to this Hebrew scribe, there is no grander follower of Christ. A great deal the writer owes to this scribe.

One morning he had occasion to consult Reb Zalman and entered the Shtiebel. It seemed empty. But in the shadow of the Ark Reb Zalman was still at his prayers. He went away and came again. Reb Zalman was gone. The sun, gleaming obliquely in, cast a red shine on the Rabbi’s seat. He approached and found a pool of tears on the bench before which the Rabbi had been standing in prayer.

That day he met Moses and was startled to realize how old the master was, how white his hair, how grey his straggling little goatee, how lined and hollow his cheeks, how feeble and stumbling his limbs.

The same day he had occasion to examine the carving in one of the Catholic churches. By a pillar knelt Nora, weeping passionately, praying. . . .

Outwardly undemonstrative are most Jewish parents. Barnett and Sarah twined in spiritual embrace. Their thoughts now never apart. Twined and writhed. Into this spiritual embrace crept Nora. After Nora, Moses. All four drawn together by a common hope, a common fear. David, the compass of their lives. A little thing could make them twine and writhe together closer—closer. A little thing like being told by the scribe that Davy’s one-time playmate, the Gentile Jimmy Bolton, had returned one-eyed from France. These days one may meet the now sightless soldier selling laces in Trafalgar Square.

The LAW must be given and taken and absorbed before the LAND OF PROMISE can be reached. Ikey Levinson died, Jimmy Bolton was maimed—all according to the Law. What if the Promised Land is as far off as ever? Did Moses succeed that they should not fail? To this day the people of Moses read the Law. Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy—and Genesis once more. In such matters the Gentile follows the Jew—with a difference. Mankind unrolls its Scroll of Unlaw over and over again. Generation after generation. Has its genesis, makes its exodus into the world, fills a stipulated number of pages with its levitical sacrifices, numbers and takes stock in the wilderness, tries its senile hand at deuteronomical revision and dies with a wretched swan-song at the threshold of the ever-receding, ever-luring Promised Land. And the next generation begins with its genesis all over again. So run both books—of Law and of Unlaw. And as the Books of Moses so the Books of Mr. Moses. In the first he wrought for himself, with help from Reb Zalman, a new heaven and earth. In the second he made his exodus from the bondage of his sorrows and cheated himself into assumption of leadership. Like Moses of old he, too, would lead his people from the bondage of the Gentiles. Where his namesake failed, how might he succeed? So carefully he prepared for a Joshuah to follow him. If God demanded that the exodus should be sealed with the blood of sacrifice, ’twas but in the nature of the Pentateuch. Leviticus, with its sacrifices, must follow Exodus. A whole generation might die in the wilderness, himself included, but not his Joshuah. He relied upon the Bible. No, not Davy. As the dead threatened to outnumber the living, Moses stiffened his lower lip from its foolish droop and stammered to himself: Courage! after the sacrifices of Leviticus, the numbering in the wilderness. After the swan-song, the Promised Land! Only Reb Zalman had the power to distil a momentary peace into the fevered mind of the Hebrew-teacher, whose world was now made up of hectic speech-making for Zionism, hectic intensity of teaching in his classroom and hectic anxiety for news from David, his Davy.

The blinds were down in NORMANDY.

On her bed a woman in nurse’s uniform gnawed her pillow in agony and remorse and regret. Regretted in her agony and remorse the prudery that had turned fruitlessly away from her virgin couch a young officer the night before he left for the front.

He had stolen up into her bedroom when all the household had retired. She opened the door to him just a little, persuading herself that, brother-like, he wanted to exchange a whispered word. But in David’s blood pealed the chant of earth-love to which something in her, OF her, responded. Her brain slept but her heart was awake and recognized the sound of her beloved knocking and crying: Open to me my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled; for my head is filled with the dew, and my locks with the tears of night.

Her heart knew and pulsed madly when her beloved thrust open wide the door and clasped her in unmistakable embrace. Only a thin nightdress to stifle the wild leapings of her breasts. And he uttered hoarse, mad, shameful words such as no virtuous maid might willingly hear and be virtuous still. And she strove with him silently, raged madly against both his strength and her own weakness. Strove till she could strive no more, and then put her arms round him and kissed his lips and eyes, and begged him to forget for that moment that she was only a shikseh, and treat her as one of his own—as a yiddish girl. Her woman-wit forged the subtle slander that weakened him and made him loose her and kneel at her white feet and kiss them and cry for forgiveness while she fondled his bent head and triumphed over herself and her love. And so he left her as he had found her—his sister, his love, his dove, his undefiled.

The blinds were down in NORMANDY.

O! she could kill herself for her prim prudery! In those first twelve months of war she had been thrust towards womanhood. The sex tremor had not failed to touch her. Her convent upbringing less resistant than a thin nightdress. Her eyes and ears were assailed with the illicit loves of Venus and Mars. ‘We who are about to die salute you!’—and working-class hussies met Jack and Tom in entries, and leisured ladies made assignations with Captain and Colonel; and members of the world’s oldest profession grumbled that amateurs spoiled their trade. And she was now a nurse of men.

O! she could kill herself for her prim prudery! The boy had wanted her more than all the world. As she had wanted him. As she now knew she had wanted him. And he was dead. She would have no second chance to give—to take. He might not altogether have died. She might have been the mother of his child. Shame! In her agony her mouth twisted in bittermock. Shame? No more shameful—infinitely less shameful than the shame of this hideous totality of his loss.

‘O Christ!’ she moaned. ‘Let me die! Only let me die!’

The blinds were down in NORMANDY.

A newly-created Cardinal in Rome, pacing the corridors of the Vatican, sensed a moan from afar and felt asudden afraid lest the craving to look once again on the child of his loins should prove the stronger over whip and hair-shirt and even Christ. His one night of love he had bloodily erased from his memory—or tried hard to believe he had—but not the face of his child. She grew upon him in dreams of the night. Her face and form changed ever as changes a desert mirage, but, according to proverb, the more it changed the more it was intrinsically the same. And it was a luring madness, a torment hellish in its irritation, not to know what her features now precisely were like. Little details, such as the colour of her eyes, he had actually forgotten. Were they blue like his own or black-brown like her—her mother’s? Was her chin dimpled—or smooth as his own? And her hair, it used to be—what? He had forgotten! And the priest feared that insanity was creeping over him. It seemed to him that he heard a moaning. Was it an omen of her sorrow? Was her heart reaching out to him as his reached out to her? . . .

Nine months. Period between sowing and budding of human seed. Nine months. Longer than passion of man takes to wasten to still birth. The first of May, anniversary of the reaping of the ripened corn-god. Nine months. Only nine months since Ikey calling had evoked sorrow for Nora and Moses and Sarah and Barnett. From her bed of agony and regret and remorse the shikseh rose. She was a nurse of men. How many white beds in hurriedly adapted hospitals stretched between her and the nothingness of the convent that must, failing death, be its substitute for her? . . .

And Moses was hurt that his School for Hebrew had suddenly ceased to fill even a part of his heart. He sought in himself the reason why, and was scared to find that once again—a third time—his destiny had mocked him. Once again—a third time—his angel of light had turned into clay, dead clay, foul nightmare of grinning putrefaction. And he had long ago promised himself that if destiny mocked him a third time, a fatal third time, he would arise and curse God and cry out against Him that He was a delusion and a snare and that He had made the world and all therein for a cruel whim that proved Him one with mankind’s traditional foe. But in that direction lay madness ambushed. He would go to the Shtiebel. Who was he to argue with God? He was not of the thirty-six who, like his namesake son of Amram, may speak to God face to face, may strive with Him and even charge Him with injustice and compel Him to annul His own decree. He would go to the shtiebel. Reb Zalman should accompany him to the Cohens, should see what God had done.

The blinds were down in NORMANDY.

2. THE SORROWING OF BARNETT AND SARAH

The blinds were down in NORMANDY. The drawing-room, where the mourners’ service had been held that morning, had stripped itself of its ornaments and swathed itself in cerements; hid was the golden mirror behind a shrouding sheet, covered up was the gay damask with white covers. The gaunt, obscured daylight triumphed miserably over the feeble glare from a couple of candles in brass candlesticks on either side of the shrouded mirror. The chesterfield lurked dingily in the uncurtained bay. The centre of the room was occupied by a clothless, oak, gate-legged dining table, littered with velvet bags containing the prayershawls and phylacteries of friends who had formed the quorum for service that morning. In the midst of the litter of velvet bags and Prayerbooks, a little wick raised its tiny light from a tumbler of oil. The Jewish death-light.

The day before, on the Sabbath of the Lord his God, Barnett had received the information from the War Office. It was late in the afternoon, and a sickly fear had prevented him from opening it until after he had sanctified with tapers and wine the distinction between Israel and the nations, between light and darkness and between the Sabbath and the week-days.

There were other messages from the War Office that Sabbath. One to another Cohen household further up the road, where a young Mrs. Dave Cohen cried out in protracted labour. It was not told to her that her husband, mutilated and shell-shocked, would reach the paternal roof the next day. Forlorn hope this of the medical men; perhaps the youngster’s sanity might not be utterly irrecoverable. And that day, or one like to it, the Hebrew scribe before referred to stared at the long-delayed tidings that his cousin had been bayoneted for Russia and that his uncle had been smashed to smithereens for Austria, and that his grandfather, driven out with all his village to Siberia, had been overcome by the anguish and sufferings of his Jews and had changed from a wise Rabbi into a blithering idiot, and remained so to the day of his death, happily not long delayed. What will you? Europe broke the eggs and America enjoys the omelettes. What of it? Nothing. The world is civilized now. The League of Nations proposes to make poison gas illegal and to limit armaments, and the Devil sniggers and God, perhaps, weeps.

The shikseh it was who read the official message stating that David Cohen, Lieutenant, of such and such a regiment, fell in action on such and such a hill on such and such a date—and, maybe, his king and country’s condolence.

It was now a score of hours later. On low stools sat Barnett and Sarah. His waistcoat and her blouse were torn a handsbreadth down over their hearts. A long time they had sat so, Sarah swaying with slow regularity forward and backward, Barnett stiff and blindly staring before him. They had not washed that day, nor had Barnett shaved, and their faces were grubby with unwiped tears. Barnett’s lips moved, and from them issued the traditional melody. The refrain has undergone a tragic metamorphosis. Barnett’s voice in its flat hoarseness bore no resemblance to its former cap-and-bell, merry harshness. It made of the traditional refrain a mad dirge. And his eyes as they stared blindly before him were glassy.

‘Tri-BAM-im-bim BAM-im-bim BAM-im-bim BAM-im-bim. Tri-BAM-bim BAM-bim BAM-bim—’ And Barnett broke down and hid his glassy eyes in his hands and sobbed like a little child. Sarah raised herself on her stool and stared round at her husband and moaned in a drear monotone:

‘Our boy is dead! Our boy is dead! So yo’ng! So yo’ng!’

Nora had gone to her hospital. Later on friends would gather again in that room for evening service. Meanwhile, but for the maids, they were alone in NORMANDY. Meanwhile they had a respite of loneliness, and Sarah and her Barnett could cry. Barnett had not left off sobbing, but for some minutes smothered in a soul-stupor into which her crying gradually penetrated. Without lifting his heavy head he scolded her:

‘Sarah,’ his choking voice reprimanded. ‘I ask you. Vhat’s de good of crying? Vill you bring him back mit crying—ha?’

And he relapsed into the stupor from which she had roused him, and sobbed quietly and casually as though sobbing was natural and habitual to the Jew. Sarah rose wearily and tottered to him and fell on her knees by him and stroked his arm and swayed backward and forward and told her woe to the four walls.

‘Our boy vas so good und clever. How heavy it vas to bring him up. Vhen he vas borrn de ness said I vas dying. I looked on him und lived for him. Our little Leieleh died a baby. Our big Davy died a man. Ve tought he vould now pay us back for all our trobble. Be a great man in Israel. Und he has left us lonnly—lonnly like a stone. Ve vorrked for him. Lerrning. College. Ve looked to have nachas from him. Und now he is dead. Dead. All his life a dream. A dream vhat made us a bit happy. Und now he is dead. Dead. Ve vake up. De dream is gone. Ve vake up und ve cry. Oi, mein kind! Mein kind! (My child! My child!) A dream. A dream.’

‘Und vhat is our life, Sarah?’ subconsciously replied Barnett in his wife’s drear monotone. ‘Vhat is our life? A dream also. A bad dream. Vhat is de use any more of us dreaming—sleeping—living? Please God ve shall dream not long. Our boy is dead. Dead.’

‘Dead—dead,’ echoed poor Sarah and burst anew into a bitter wail. ‘Who vill sit shiva (week of mourning) for us? Who vill cry for us vhen VE are dead? Who vill say kaddish for us? Barnett! Barnett!’ She shook his arm in frenzy of grief reconceived. ‘Our boy is dead! Our SON is dead!’

And Barnett dully beat his head and answered:

‘Dead—dead. Und like mit Moses ve donnt know vhere his grave is.’

Sarah let go his arm and rocked, and mocked the unhappy comparison.

‘Moses,’ she muttered in rebellion. ‘Moses vas buried by God, but who buried our Davy?’ Her lips writhed as in derision of laughter. ‘Our boy’s bones vill never comm to a Jewish grave. Odder fader-mudders vill go to cry on deir children’s graves und ve—ve shall stop behind.’

Sorrow exquisite theirs with no rival to its pain. What comfort could Mr. Moses and Reb Zalman, now at the street door, bring them? At the latter’s finger-behest the former went in to the drawing-room. Reb Zalman himself rested awhile in the hall. He was an old and easily-tired man. They had not rung the bell. The street door is often open in houses of mourning amongst Jews. Nor did Mr. Moses wait to be announced. He opened the drawing-room door and looked down on the mourners seated bowed and softly crying on their low stools. He looked down upon them and remembered how he himself had so sat when his first Rachel had died, leaving his second Rachel crying feebly in his arms under the baptism of his tears. Baptism! Unfortunate thought-phrase. He looked down on Barnett and Sarah and compared their comparatively happy bereavement with his second mourning, wordless, tearless. Yet somehow he could now recall his second Rachel without the old rancour; and he grieved bitterly that the satisfaction of his rancour was also to be denied to him.

‘Sarah,’ sobbed Barnett. ‘Stop already! I cannot see already from crying!’ and he turned away his face and cried ‘Oi mein kind! Mein kind!’

They had not marked his entry. Moses felt himself constrained to come forward and in arid tones repeat the prescribed Hebrew formula:

‘May the Omnipresent comfort you amid the rest of the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem,’ and without removing his overclothes or hat he went round the table and took a chair opposite them and hammered softly on the bare oak with trembling fist. Sarah, without turning round, demanded of him:

‘For de ruin of onnly de Temple long—long ago, ve fast vone day a yerr. How many days should ve fast for de ruin of all our life?’

Moses was silent. What could he say? He had no comfort for himself, how might he have any for them? The dead boy was child of their bodies—but no less child of his soul. The teacher is greater than the parent, say the Rabbis. Parents bring a child only into this world, but a true teacher brings his scholar into the next. Much passion and pain and care had gone from his parents to Davy’s upbringing, and now was the nachas of their lives turned to dust and ashes. Well might Sarah mock with bitter comparison the annual fast wherewith the Children of Israel still mourn the triumph of the Romans. The Jewish people survived their destruction and now reached out to some undefined but not uncertain future—while they, Sarah and Barnett, old and stricken with years, to what future might they aspire that survival of their sorrow prove not a divine ironic snarl?

And yet—spoke Moses to his heart as he softly hammered the bare oak with his trembling fist—what was their sorrow to his? Was not David his spiritual son upon whom he had spent all the love and soul-care that neither Rachel his wife nor Rachel his child had ever gotten from him? Had he not trained him and fashioned him, snared him and shaped him and moulded him until, in all matters connected with Judaism, he had—allowing for his youth—become but an extension of himself? Was not Israel bereft as well as himself and Sarah and Barnett? Was not David to have pleaded with the nations on behalf of Israel? Was it not in order to seek first-hand copy for his eloquence that he himself had been prepared to send the lad down into the shambles—therefrom to take hold of the gorily manifest Jewish tragedy and fling it down before the powers as a challenge of their inhumanity to the Jew? What was all the war but a means for speeding the redemption? What was the death of Ikey Levinson but a goad to drive Davy along the hard road to mastery in Israel? What was Nora but a flame for the hardening of this chosen of the chosen people? Sarah, Barnett, Nora, Ikey, himself, the war—what were they all but tools for the creation and formation of this chief—this other Moses—this Joshuah—who was one day to lead his people out of world bondage into the Promised Land?

And David, his Davy, their Davy, was dead. The passion and pain of Barnett and Sarah, the love-flame of Nora, the sacrifice of Ikey, the life-motif of himself, the blood-orgy of the war—all wasted. David was dead, and all Israel might well mourn again for the temple of their hope once more overthrown.

3. BARGAINS WITH GOD

As a matter of fact, Barnett’s stupor was due to a belief that somehow God had dealt unfairly with him—to put it bluntly, God had cheated him. The Barnetts of the world confuse God with the fiend-fears of their ancestors. The savage, though, was more logical. ‘God is good,’ he opined, ‘and wouldn’t harm us folk, so what for should we pray to him and offer him sacrifice? But the devil is bad and always seeking to do us poor folk harm. He drowns the girls who go for water to the river. He burns up the rain. He dries up the earth so that we die of hunger. He kills our little ones with stones when we build the house of the king. He frightens us with the thunder and lightning. He stirs up quarrels amongst friends. Oh he is a bad devil! Therefore we must pray to him and sacrifice to him our girls and our little ones and our best ones.’

Something of the old heathen Terach stirred in Barnett the Jew. That time when he had made a little joke that no gentleman would have taken notice of. But God was no gentleman. He had taken notice of that miserable jest. And Leah the baby had been taken from them. Even then it had seemed unfair for the great God to have taken him, humble Barnett Cohen, a mere tailor, at his word. But He had, and, what could a mere mortal say to God in protest? But from the day Leah the baby had been taken, Barnett had become afraid for Davy. He remembered that Davy had been spared to him and was not ungrateful. When he had added Jacob to the boy’s name, it had seemed to him a sort of compact. God and himself against the devil—and the partnership, unlike that between himself and the goy, had been successful. When God had punished him for his joke, Barnett sought to renew the partnership. He went over to God’s side. Since then God had never had anything to complain. Barnett had become in every sense an orthodox Jew. And for years everything had been all right. And now God had gone back upon their bargain.

‘The Tempter, the Devil and the Angel of Death are one,’ a saying of the Talmud that Barnett had heard at Reb Zalman’s table in the Shtiebel one evening. Who was it that had tempted him to religion and who now laughed up his sleeve? And Barnett clenched his hands and pressed them to his burning eyeballs as if he would crush through and through and annihilate the red circles scorching his poor, tired brain.

Was God not also part of that unity of Tempter and Devil and Death Angel? What was the use of thought to man? Without the torture of thought Barnetts would not suffer so much.

Sarah, too, was not content with God’s dealings. And with even more reason for resentment. For when had she—Sarah, daughter of Leah the squint-eyed, on her be peace!—ever failed in the three chief duties incumbent upon a God-fearing Jewish woman and wife? When had she omitted the least detail of the purification ritual? When had she failed to give of her baking to charity, or to cast a morsel of her weekly dough into the fire? Or when had she failed to light her Sabbath candles? Did she not, even when her Barnett had not been all that he Jewishly ought to have been, keep the home strictly kosher? With all her might of will and tongue had she not seconded the efforts of Mr. Moses to make and preserve their Davy a complete Jew meet for God and man? Wherefore then had this murderous blow fallen upon her? And had she, too, not sought in simple woman-fashion to ingratiate herself with the Over One, Blessed be He!?

‘Ever since he vent avay,’ moaned Sarah her sullen complaint—‘I gafe double charity und double candles in de synagogue. Vhat vas de good? Vhat vas de good? Oi, mein kind!’

Cruel—cruel. How could the Almighty have been so cruel to Sarah, humble and faithful daughter of Leah the Squint-eyed of Pamunitzé—on her be peace!’

Moses heard and said no word. He had no comfort. He was himself on the verge of such an outcry against God as would swamp all their petty complainings. At the last they had each the other. As for himself—first he had lived for his youth and that, with the early death of his parents, had too quickly deserted him. Then he had lived for Rachel his bride, and her God had snatched from him. Then he had lived for Rachel his daughter, and her a Christian had taken from him. Then he had lived for the Redemption and the Redeemer, and both in one fell stroke had been slain as if before his very eyes. Perhaps, but for the knowledge of the presence of Reb Zalman in the hall, he might there and then have cursed his All-destroyer and All-depriver and died. As it was he put God aside for a later time. From his coat pocket he withdrew a copy of the Jewish Chronicle, turned its pages under the glimmer of the death-light, and Sarah and Barnett overheard him as he read in muttering voice:

4. JEWISH CONSOLATION

‘Fifty thousand Jewish families driven out naked and starving from the big towns in south-west Russia. . . . Further pogroms in Poland. . . . The blood-libel rears again its bloody head. Every third Jewish family in mourning. Half a million Jews fighting—on both sides. . . .

‘Mein Gott!’ whispered Davy’s father softly. ‘Half a million Jews—fighting—for vhat?’

The master’s ruse had succeeded. Where all are dirty it were unsocial to be clean. The introspective egoism of the couple’s brooding was changed by the presentation of the larger tragedy into a contemplation of a calamity of sorrows of which theirs was but one. Death was no longer an individual foe. God more than a personal enemy.

‘Oi, God our Fader!’ flung up Sarah her arms in wild gesture of consciously futile appeal. ‘Gottenyu! Gottenyu! Sveet Fader in Heaven! How many Jewish daughters are crying for DEIR children! Oi, Gottenyu! Gottenyu! You promised never again to send a flood over de volld—und now You are drowning de errt’ in a sea of blood!’

Reb Zalman, sitting in the hall, overheard and weighed the words of Sarah Cohen, and shook his head in sad negation, as though he knew the plan of Almighty God and found it just and irresistible. Let it not be thought that it was impudent of Sarah so to speak to Almighty God. The Jew and the Over One are old friends between whom such liberties are permissible. He Himself invited such argument when He said: ‘Come and let us reason together. Though your sins be as scarlet, etc.’ And certainly Sarah’s sins were not as red as all that. Something in her cry wrenched from Barnett his self-control. He raised his head and grimly stared at the emptiness before him as if giving God time to reply to Sarah’s arraignment. Then, trembling as with a fit of ague, he spoke, and his voice was harsh and hard.

‘Sarah, I ask you. Vhat for you argue mit God? Tink God vants you advice—ha? If God vould do vhat ve vant—’ he staggered to his feet and heavily upstretched his arms. ‘—He vould do a miracle und BRING HIM BACK!’ His voice rose to a hoarse scream and his hands with their trembling fat fingers clutched at the air as if they would climb up and claw the Over One out of his very heavens.

‘Oi, Gottenyu!’ Barnett shrieked, his mind unconsciously swaying to the other Cohens up the road. ‘My son! My son! Vounded! Crippled! Onnly my son! My Dovid’ll!’

Moses felt his heart leap in confirmation of the entreaty as he beheld Barnett clawing and shrieking. For a moment he seemed to be clutching his way to Heaven’s very throne. For a moment, and then he fell back limp and exhausted and sank once more into his habitual stupor.

Reb Zalman in the hall overheard Barnett’s outcry and suddenly stiffened. One of the maids had occasion to pass through the hall, and the sight of the rigid, white-faced old man with dead, open eyes, frightened her. She ran back, and when she returned with the other servant, the Rabbi was gone.

Neither Barnett nor Sarah knew of Reb Zalman’s coming or going. Her left hand groped blindly.

‘Barnett, my man,’ she whimpered. ‘Tousands und tousands of Jewish fader-mudders cry like ve cry. Deir sons give deir lives for peoples dat donnt b’long to dem. For lands dat let dem live und for lands dat donnt let dem even die de Jew gives his blood und his brains und his body und his soul. Oi, Master! Master!’

Rhetoric of misery that in its surge for expression did not disdain to lay bare Jewry’s sores. And Moses was grateful that the climax of wretchedness had come and gone, and read on, muttering, choosing, summarizing.

‘In Palestine is desolation. . . . The colonies for which our pioneers have given their lives these last twenty years and more, laid waste. . . . Massacres expected at the moment of going to press . . . may by this have begun. . . . Old and young without bread or even potatoes. . . . Those who can have fled to Egypt. . . . Useless to send food parcels as none is ever received. . . .’

The Hebrew scribe referred to before tendered the writer unsolicited confirmation of the fact. An old couple of his acquaintance had starved to death in Palestine though their well-to-do children and grandchildren in Manchester exhausted every means of assisting them.

The cunning of Moses had succeeded in widening the area of the Cohens’ misery and consequentially diminishing its density. Not comfort but its half-sister, negation of loneliness, now filled them.

‘Vhat shall ve Jews do?’ lamented Sarah no longer for herself and her man but for the whole of her folk. ‘Vhat shall ve Jews do? Vhere shall ve Jews terrn? Can ve feel glad vhen Russia takes our children? Und vhen our sons die for Aingland, mustn’t ve cry—no?’

A subtle woman’s side-rebuke this to the man whose cunning had stolen from her her only excuse for remaining a somebody in the wide world. He had robbed her of the uniqueness of her sorrow.

5. THE VISION OF MOSES

Moses sighed and attempted to continue his reading and summarizing, but his eyes refused to see and his brain to accept the printed lines. His head sagged. Between the bottom of the page and the edge of the polished table an old man looked back at him. An old sad man whose hair was very white under his hat, whose straggly little goatee beard was fast going grey and whose lower lip drooped weakly and who most likely stumbled in his walk. And Moses was scared. He thought he recognized in the reflection that glimmered under the death-light not himself, but his people. Not Moses but Israel. Israel gone old.

For the first time Israel appeared to Moses as an old man. Always in previous apparitions Israel had come as a child, a stripling, an adventurer if you will; but always young—ever young. To grow up implied ultimate senility. No. Israel never grew up. Yellow badge—earlocks—caftan—merry disguise of eternal childhood eternally precocious. In his being had shaped itself a saga of the wandering Jew all-differing from the Gentile conception. It had sung itself into his heart, and now with inner fingers he tore it out again and made it croon its magic exorcism. Let the old face under him hear and drop its hope-mocking mask. ‘No! No!’ he pleaded silently to the polished oak and started back at the feeble way the senile mouth babbled back at him. His breath dulled the surface and a jeer of triumph recurled the master’s faltering lips. In wild self-delusion he examined the clearing surface for some hint of Israel ever young, with some mad wish of tracing a suggestion of poor Davy’s dead lineaments to smear as a balm on his heart’s wound. He started back again. Strangely mingled with his own outlines were those of the shikseh, Nora. Nora! Her great blue eyes oddly merged in his own brown—her smooth olive face queerly agleam upon his own tightly-stretched parchment skin—Nora! What was she that she should lurk from out his features in sad impertinence! What had she to do with Israel?

A remembered phrase from old schooling flashed in his mind:

Que diable fait-elle dans cette galère?

Suddenly he was conscious of his hatred for the girl. He hated her for the use he had intended to make of her. One more futility in the sum of his resentment. And all the more he must hate for that he had almost been snared into loving by her. His personal portion of the schoolroom would wake as from dark sleep in the sunshine of her coming. And she came frequently. Sometimes on pretence of using his old Yost for his speeches. Sometimes for a cup of tea. Lies. And she would needle his clothes, a button here, a fray there. Often she would bring with her a shmaltz-herring, a tasty anchovy one, which she would cut up as daintily as any lady of the Lane. Almost against his will was Moses snared to clutch at the threads of affection she flicked at him continually. Absurd! He was an old, exhausted, burnt-out candle-end of a man. Then why did his heart leap at her footsteps lightly atrip on the stairs? Why did the touch of her cool fingers send a thrill up and down his bent spine? Absurd! But why had of late his nightly torture been interrupted by dreams of ease wherein, as an angel bearing with her and all round of her a circle—surface of Heaven, Nora walked and fetched him ease and halt of sorrow?

But God had not as yet tricked him then. David had been still living and sending cheery letters in that left-handed scrawl of his. That left hand that would never write again. And Nora would bring him every few days scraps of airy nothings from her own letters to feed the hunger of the tidings-avid old man. And with these scraps, more than by her own gentle ways, she had paid court to him and won his love. Snared him. For that too he must hate her. An unused tool that now never-more would be used, her presence was become a mocking superfluity. He drew down the journal over the vision, thrust her back into unreality and lifted his head to Barnett who, with something of his old queerness of phrasing, was speaking.

‘Oi, Master! Master! For two tousand yerrs God has been bleeding his Jews—und not yet cured dem—ha, Master?’

Time was when Moses had been proud of the title Master. When packed East End masses had risen as one and cheered with the salutation his passionate eloquence. But here and now the mockery of the word whipped him into excusation.

‘No! No!’ he cried, his eyes aglare and his voice harsh. ‘Not I—I have long been too old and weak to dare rise up a master in Israel. Not I. Davy! YOU bore him. I trained him. You are too selfish. He is my loss no less than yours. All Israel’s loss——’

‘But onnly Sarah und me,’ protested Barnett drearily, ‘—sit shiva for him.’

Moses forgot his patience. His eyes gleamed with fanatic despair. His mouth twisted with pain. He harshly upbraided them.

‘I mourn my Rachel living and you mourn your David only dead—who should be happier? My Rachel may still be living a dead harlot—while your David died a living Jew. Whose sorrow is the greater? I—a master? A master in misery—no more! Fooled. You and I and Israel. Fooled, I tell you. God’s fools we. Without reckoning on God I had chosen Davy to be our mouthpiece to the Gentiles. As a Jew who had offered himself freely to the need of the country that had sheltered and tolerated him and his people—with his brilliance—with his energy and enthusiasm—how well he would have represented us! How he would have pleaded for Israel before the whole world——’

‘Und now,’ concluded Sarah with depreciative impiety, ‘now he can beg for us onnly from God! Oi, mein kind!’ the mother resumed her keening in a minor tone. ‘So kind you vas—so good!’

And Barnett followed on while Moses regained his former stark self-control.

‘Und vhenever he vas ill he vould never like to trobble his mudder und made alvays Nora to attend to him!’

Moses smiled faintly at the reaction. The mere mention of this Gentile girl had served to loosen the tension. Moses pursued the suddenly cleared road to normality. He rose up and went to the door, opened it and looked out. Reb Zalman was not there. Queer that he had left without a word to him and without bestowing on the mourners even the prescribed Hebrew sentence of condolence. But one was accustomed not to question the Rabbi’s actions. Moses turned back and remarked that the faces of the mourning couple were not now so bowed under the obsession of their loss. As an angel bearing with her and all round of her a circle-surface of Heaven, the very mention of the shikseh’s name fetched ease and halt of sorrow.

‘As I was coming here,’ volunteered Moses resuming his seat, ‘I met an officer in conversation with Nora. They were standing by the door of the shell-shock hospital. She looked like death, poor girl. I wonder if that poor Dave up the road is her case. He is to be brought home to-day as you know. And his wife expecting any minute—I could see from a distance that the poor girl was all atremble.’

‘A good gell,’ agreed Barnett. Sarah, too, snatched as at the trailing skirts of an angel’s passing.

‘Oi,’ she said, the stone on her heart not so heavy, not so dragging. ‘Vhen she read out de bitter news she vent like vax, und she couldn’t cry, nebbich! She couldn’t cry und ran upstairs to herr room to be alon’—alon’. I know. I know. No yiddishé gell could haf luved our Davy better dan dat shikseh. I know it now. I know it now.’

What did she know—the sorrow only or the regret also?

‘Und if Davy had comm back,’ Barnett turned upon his wife with the futile irritation of momentary senility ‘—vould you haf stopped dem—ha?’ He turned to Moses whose look had suddenly hardened at the impossible possibility. ‘You know, dis monning before going out she said dat after de var vas over she vas going to be a nun—ha? P’raps if all vomen—’ Barnett had at last grasped again, if only for a moment, his cap-and-bells. ‘P’raps if all vomen became nuns, tzivilization might be cured—ha? Und might not!’

6. THE MIRACLE

The door opened and Nora appeared. She was in her nurse’s uniform which her falling coat revealed. In the doorway she slipped off her coat. Almost in the same movement she pulled her hat from her flaxen curls. Her strangely blue eyes shone weirdly from her waxen olive face. And her lips were feverishly red. There was witchcraft in the girl’s face, muttered Moses in his heart as he caught himself staring back into those strangely blue eyes. There was a message in them that he could not read for the moment. There was witchcraft in them. Else why should they conjure up dead eyes—those of his two Rachels? He rose the better to decipher the message he sensed in those blue eyes that stared at him, stared into him as though they were trying to pierce the fog about his brain. He felt his legs give way under him. He gripped the back of his chair for support. He tightened the droop of his lower lip. Those eyes left his own and cast a quick glance behind her and again flashed their message to him. He began to sense something—a hint of an impossibility that nevertheless brought the blood to his head with a hideous rush. The wheels of his brain whirled fast—faster. No, No! It could not be. With a terrific effort he put the brake on the wheels of his brain. He questioned her eyes with his own. Back came the answer. He drew himself taut as if to meet a blow. A sudden fit of trembling was too much for him and he sank back into his chair, dazed. Impossible. Yet. . . Reb Zalman. . .

‘Vhat you standing like dat for, Nora?’ spoke Barnett to her. ‘You heart crying for dat vounded Dave up de road—ha? for Cohen’s poor Dave—ha? Onnly vounded, Nora! onnly mad! Oi veh! How happy must HIS fader-mudder be!’

The girl stood still in the doorway, looking into Moses until she saw her message had at last penetrated into him. With a short, hard sigh, she turned to the mourners and made a slow step towards Sarah who sat nearest to the door.

‘Donnt mind him, Norelé,’ and the old woman’s voice was sad and caressing. ‘Clemmed you heart, nebbich!’

She stirred as if to make room for her on her low stool as if to accord to this shikseh the privilege of mourning for her Jewish lover. But with a little choking moan Nora fell at the old woman’s feet and buried her fair head in Sarah’s lap. Gently Davy’s mother stroked the flaxen curls and stared before her and swayed gently and half-crooned:

‘I had two children, Norelé,’ as if relating an old tale. ‘Two children. Vone vent like a pale little flower vhen vinter’s colld vind blows, und de odder grew up like a straight tree till de Angel of Deat’ came mit his axe und chopped him down. Und now ve are alonn. You und me. Vhat can men know of de luv of vomen? Vhen ve are gells ve feel de knowledge of de time vhen little, little, soft little fingerlach vill vone day pull in our hearts. Und ve laugh to de babies dat vait for us—and de men dey tink ve smile to dem. Vhat can men know of de sorrow of vomen? You und me—ve know—und cry—cry.’ The older woman’s tears fell slowly down the ready furrows and she rocked the dry-eyed girl in her arms. Suddenly Nora lifted her face from Sarah’s lap and spoke slowly as if in a kind of trance. Moses, unperceived by the mourners, began surreptitiously to gather up cushions from floor and chairs and heap them on the chesterfield that lurked in the uncurtained, blind-dusked bay.

‘I gave double candles to the virgin,’ said Nora, confessing her own bargain with God, ‘and I prayed to our Saviour to save him. At the foot of the cross I vowed my life for his (bargain on bargain). Our God is a merciful God and surely our Saviour would intercede for him. And—last night I had a dream—a dream—a dream’—she rose to her feet and tried hard to fight down her hysteria—‘a dream that—that he was—crippled’—her breath came hard—‘crippled in body and—and—crippled in mind—and when I saw him—in—my—dream—in my dream—he was—being—being—being brought HOME!’ The overwrought girl just failed to stifle the scream that rushed out of her hardening throat as she repeated wildly, hysterically: ‘HE WAS BEING BROUGHT HOME—HOME!!’

Followed a mad pause vibrating with overcharged silence. Sarah stared dazedly before her—stared at Barnett unstirring from his lethargy—stared round at Moses tremblingly piling cushions on the chesterfield—stared at last up to the insanely twitching red lips of the shikseh—stared until some influence in the vibrating silence drove her to stumble to her knees at the feet of the rigid breaker of news, to clutch at her nurse’s uniform, to mouth her fair young hands with her swollen old lips and to shriek:

‘Nora! NORELÉ! Tell us! Tell us! TELL US! Oi! Oi!’ she wailed. ‘Vhy donnt you tell us—tell us—tell us——’

His wife’s shrieking and wailing and wild antics startled Barnett out of his lethargy into slow-witted sensing of new horror. He started to his feet and glared at the women.

‘Sarah! Sarah!’ he cried. ‘Vhat’s de matter? Vhat’s de matter?’

‘Barnett! Barnett!’ screamed madly the mother of Davy. ‘She knows sommtink! SHE KNOWS SOMMTINK!’

Like a wild animal Barnett leaped at the rigid girl and shook her fiercely—hurtingly.

‘Vhat? Vhat?’ he demanded, his eyes bloodshot, his fingers piercing the girl to the bone. ‘Say! SAY!!’

And now a peremptory rat-tat-tat at the street door penetrated into the hysteria-filled drawing-room, and its sound, growing louder and louder in that silent house, swept abroad like the very spirit of tragedy. Sarah collapsed, fainting at Nora’s feet. Barnett unclutched his hold and shook in a fit of shivering delirium. Nora, released, spoke to Moses with her eyes. Moses moved hesitatingly towards the door. The rat-tat-tat suddenly ceased. A dragging sound took its place. With the husky cry of a beast in pain Barnett dashed himself against the wall, sobbing fearfully and unconsciously. He crushed his head against the wall as if to hide himself, to blind his eyes from new horror. Nora stooped and raised the limp, fat body of Sarah in her arms and stood once more rigid, her strangely blue eyes staring in her olive face under her flaxen curls. From her parted red lips her breath came in quick, short gasps. Moses took another faltering step towards the door, when it opened and the maid announced with a frightened attempt at sang-froid:

‘Master David. And the doctor’s on the way.’

Two soldiers in khaki carry in a stretcher upon which lies a figure huddled in blue blankets. Moses takes a firm grip upon himself and directs them to lay the figure on the chesterfield. He then half-follows them to the door but pauses on his way to extinguish the death-light. A sound between a groan and a maniacal laugh comes from the huddled figure on the couch. Moses forgets the soldiers and approaches the sick man. His hand touches the blind, and he jerks it up. Jerks up the rest of the blinds and floods the room with light. The maid holds open the door for the two soldiers. The first passes out without a word. The second pauses to lift his hand to his mouth, winks and whispers:

‘Sye, kid! ’Alf-past eyght t’night at the back? Righto!’

The maid tosses her head and shuts the door after her.

1. THE WRITER’S APOLOGY

THE writer apologizes. His tale is villainless. He tried to find a villain to entertain his readers. And to wipe off old scores. To hit back at the Gentile novelists. Ninety-nine per cent of the Ikeys and Moseses in Gentile novels have hooked noses, sensual lips, wicked, scheming brains, and lisps. And they are ever lying in wait to overreach the simple, honest, manly, innocent Gentiles.

So the writer planned revenge in the form of contrast between Judaic perfection and a hard-hearted, sensual, caddish, hypocritical Gentile dastard. In dalliance with his muse was the villain begotten; but perhaps he was ill-conceived. Or perhaps there was an accident. Before pen and paper kissed, the villain had slipped away into the limbo of the still-born. The writer apologizes.

2. THE REDEMPTION OF THE FIRST-BORN

After Davy, with the help of Nora and the doctor—the lad’s friend and co-member of the Bunny Club, Phineas Rodman—had been made as comfortable as possible upstairs, Barnett felt a restless urge to pay a condolence visit to that other Cohen up the road with whom he seemed to have changed places. Easy to see how the mistake had been made. Both in the same regiment. What was it he had heard Moses stammer to himself? Something about Reb Zalman—absurd. Nevertheless he went just as he was, without even changing his unnecessarily rent waistcoat, without even washing his face or shaving, just as he was. And seven paces from his own gates he met Reb Zalman, looked into his deep-sunken eyes and had a vision of the Rabbi and the Presence in dispute, and beyond them in a shadow of light the Angel of Death all in a flutter, with Davy’s soul in his arms. The Presence was angry with Reb Zalman but the latter stood his ground until the Presence smiled and nodded, and the Death Angel flashed out and back with another soul in his arms. Reb Zalman was not yet content. The Death Angel had to bring forth a new soul from behind the Throne, a newly-to-be-born soul, in place of one to be still-born. Then was Reb Zalman content, and the Presence smiled as might smile a fond, proud, indulgent parent. With a start Barnett found himself still looking into the deep-sunken eyes of the Rabbi of the Shtiebel. In them he realized a command.

‘Shalom (Peace),’ said to him Reb Zalman and went his way.

Barnett Cohen did not go to Morris Cohen’s house of mourning up the road that evening. The quorum was made up without him. The service was read in furtive whispers lest the girl-widow upstairs be disturbed in her travail.

The week of mourning ended, the posthumous man-child was initiated into the Abrahamic covenant. Reb Zalman himself circumcised the baby. Mr. Moses held the human mite on a large pillow on his knees while Barnett stood by in place of the orphan’s father. And when the child had been circumcised and named David after the dead man, Barnett carried it upstairs and laid it by the crying girl-widow, in whose hand he pressed a cheque for half his fortune made out in the child’s name.

A tenth of what he had left he gave to Reb Zalman for distribution among the poor of the East End. Another tenth he gave to Mr. Moses for Zionist funds and so began to feel he could look God in the face.

No, he was not bribing God any more. He was quite content with his son only wounded, only mad. But it would just be like the Over One, blessed be He, to say to Himself: ‘Now that this tailor of a Jew doesn’t expect anything from me, I’ll just show him what God can do. He thinks he’s quite happy now, does he? Just wait till I make his boy well again and we’ll see how happy a tailor of a Jew can be—ha?’

Barnett chuckled to himself furtively that he wouldn’t mind God playing such a trick on him.

3. MADNESS

Sarah was presumably happy. She kissed her boy’s mouth as it gibbered. Tended him as if he were an infant again. Dressed him and undressed him; washed him, fed him and wiped him. Amid his ravings of blood and Cain and Sh’ma Yisroel! he would suddenly quieten and call ‘MAMMY!’ in a frightened childish whine, and fret if she failed to reach him her hand. But more often he called the shikseh, and once or twice spoke hoarse, shameful words such as no virtuous maid might hear and forgive. And at such times his mother crept away humiliated, and Nora took her place and put her arms round his wasted, butchered frame, and kissed his lips and eyes, and pleaded to him to forget that she was only a shikseh, and to treat her as a yiddish girl. So, with woman’s wile she overcame the ravings of the boy, and he thought he knelt again at her white naked feet and that he kissed them while she played with his hair; and his delirious muttering ceased as he dreamt he left her again as he had found her, his sister, his love, his dove, his undefiled.

At times, when the Master visited him, he was again in the School for Hebrew, asking difficult questions and demanding satisfactory solutions. Again he demanded of his teacher whether it was fair of God to prefer Abel’s sacrifice to Cain’s. And whether God wasn’t a coward to be frightened at the tower of Babel. Old problems that Moses had in the long-ago solved for him. But at the mention of Adam’s eldest-born, his nurses would tremble; for, unless Moses was at hand to soothe him with old explanations, he would mutter over and over again the name of earth’s first manslayer. And, muttering, he would thrust his right hand in front of his eyes—the other arm rotten somewhere in France—and, after a close examination, vainly endeavour to shake his fingers off his wrist. ‘Blood! Blood!’ he would shriek, ending up after a wild minute of ghastly screaming with the bitter, wailing, abject appeal of:

‘Forgive me—forgive me—forgive me—forgive—’ until his thin cheeks flushed with fever and his bony forehead running with sweat, he would fall into an unhealthy slumber from which on waking he would call for Mammy, Nora, Father or Master.

David, young as he was, had taken an Honours First in English literature. His ravings sometimes took the form of wild, nightmarish literary confusions. The Hebrew scribe from the East End came to see him. For a while Davy held forth with uncanny sanity upon the psychological link between such imaginings as Marjorie Bowen’s Uncanny Tales and the aboriginal folklore of Frazer’s Golden Bough. The scribe was listening wonderingly to the brilliant analysis, when the critic wandered off into a nightmarishly fantastic company who were spearing wild geese with long silver spears in a basement kitchen. The mad boy described how they stretched themselves out to the waters and, aiding their silver spears with huge steel jack-knives, how they stabbed at the long, white, spiralling necks and wrung them with fierce joy and jeered into their cursing beaks. O it was a fine hunt! and the finest of the hunters his chum Jimmy Bolton the puzzle-man. Further than any of them he leaned out—this puzzle-man Jimmy Bolton—from the slimy pavement circling the limitless waters. More fiercely than any of them stabbed he with silver spear and knife of steel. Shriller than any of their victims screeched the blasphemies from out the throats of his headless captives as, gayly laughing, he waved aloft their undying, gold-tipped, snaky-sinuous, red-dripping necks. And his laughter was gayer and madder and louder and more vehemently joyous than the laughter of them all.

‘And,’ whispered further Davy, finger on lip,—‘we all stopped our hunting and our slashing and our twisting of white necks and our laughter, and we looked at each other and shook our heads at each other; for well we knew—O well we knew!—that such excess of zeal would not go unrewarded. The dread Superspirit of the souls of all the wild geese would stretch forth his hand against the too-daring one; and we shuddered at the conjured dread of the Spirit’s vengeance with a tremulous shuddering that passed wavelike from one to other of our mute and motionless company.’

The unhappy scribe wanted to interrupt the horrible stream of mad allusion, but the lunatic silenced him with a horrid smile. There was style in his raving, style of which the poor lad was cunningly and obviously proud.

‘Listen—listen,’ he beckoned the scribe to draw closer. ‘The dread of our anticipation was soon—O how soon!—realized. A silence, as of the dead, brooded over us, a silence wherein was no trace, no shadow of an echo, of poor, drowned Jimmy’s once joyous laughter; and the shrill cursing of the geese was no more. We gazed at the fear-flaming faces of one another and mouthed words of courage that never passed our dry lips. And suddenly on the kitchen table appeared good old Jimmy Bolton’s jack-knife with open cork-screw stuck in the wood. And from all around was lanced at me the dumb command NOT to touch the knife—not to pluck it from the wood of the table and not—O NOT to thrust it into inner breast-pocket of my new dinner-jacket. But, in spite of the silent, cumulative warnings, I TOUCHED Jimmy’s steel jack-knife, I PLUCKED it out of the wood of the table and was about to THRUST it into the inner breast-pocket of my new dinner-jacket—when a fumbling at the brass handle of the kitchen door raised the hair from the heads of us all in that fearful room. The fumbling grew in volume until it shrilled into a wild clatter—and a ghastly voice, HIS voice, JIMMY’S voice, cried wailingly: “Let me in! Let me in!”—and I—’ whispered poor Davy in his weak, hoarse croak,—‘I stood with a fixed grin on my face, waiting—waiting. And the door unlatched and Jimmy, dripping and livid, stalked into the kitchen, glared round and moaned from his dead mouth “My knife! My knife!” And then his dull, dead-gleaming eyes rested on the weapon in my hands, and he leaned towards me with crooked fingers, and a triumphant leer stretched his ooze-dripping mouth. And he laid a clammy hand on my bare chest and——’

Here Davy paused for strength and suddenly emitted scream after scream until Nora and his mother ran breathlessly into the room and stopped with wild kisses his slobbering open gums, while the scribe slipped tip-toe out.

Gradually, however, he quietened. It was as if he exerted a will close beside him but not quite in him. Half-consciously he repressed his violence and permitted himself only gentle delusions. He demanded of his father with caricature of boyishness: ‘Please gimme penny, father. I want to buy puzzle same as Jimmy Bolton’s got, and I bet you, father, you won’t find the trick half as quick as me!’ Or he would thrust Nora from him saying: ‘I wouldn’t play with you. YOU! You’re not a GIRL! You’re only a SHIKSEH!’—and then he would hold her back and wistfully ask: ‘You’re not really a shikseh, are you?’ And Barnett gave his son pennies which he let fall to the floor, and Nora gave him assurances of Jewishness which he forgot to listen to, and Sarah would cringe in a corner of the room and wipe her eyes furtively and hope that God would not altogether take her Barnett at his word again, and deem them completely happy and content with their Davy only wounded—only mad.

Slowly the sap began to flow back into the maimed body of David Cohen. He was still helpless, bedridden, and his brain whirled eccentrically. His mother’s nursing fretted him so that she had to leave all those intimate sickroom attentions to the Gentile girl, a trained nurse, and under her ministrations the boy appeared to grow more placid. But in truth the patient’s mind was not yet healthy. That outside will was called upon to act again and again. Nora had nursed men before she nursed Davy. For his health’s sake more than for the sake of her own modesty, she acted ignorance with a woman’s perfection. Fortunately Davy was a poet and could find ease in rhythm of words. He was not perfect yet with his right hand. At Rodman’s hinted request Nora became typist as well as nurse to David Cohen. She typed as he dictated. Huddled in blankets, his eyes gleaming, his lips burning, his clenched fist beating time on the bedclothes, he spat out rhymes anti-deic, sex-clotted, stiff and heavy and sticky with blood, memory-vomited.

But not always did the blood-obsession prevail. One day he teased her as in earlier time with light-hearted ditty that fell strangely from his strained mouth. He sang it in a cracked, hoarse voice that made a piteous attempt to imitate the song of birds. With eyes, fast-blinking, that yet failed to hold her tears, the shikseh typed as the mad poet croaked:

The next day, as she arranged the pillow for his uneasy head, her fingers found a crushed sheet of paper ill-scrawled in pencil:

The girl’s pity grew greater than she could bear alone, and she crossed herself and fell upon her knees and clenched palm to palm and prayed violently to God and the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ and all the saints to have mercy. And no thought during the whole period of Davy’s illness could she spare for Cardinal Ignatius Darrel.

4. CONVALESCENCE

As from David’s eyes the wildness faded, they began to avoid the tenderness in Nora’s that the girl had long ceased to conceal. With increasing sanity, a worried look came to David’s thinned features. He suppressed from others the crime of which he shuddered to know himself guilty. But the suppression was not absolute. Unconscious mannerisms betrayed the hidden self-knowledge. His antics with his hand did not cease altogether. He indulged in them furtively when he thought none spied. He avoided Nora. Not so that his parents noticed. But the girl grew miserably aware that he would rather not be alone with her. This when Barnett and Sarah had come to a tacit understanding that all obstacles must be removed from the path of their union. Something beyond mere shell-shock weighed heavy on the boy’s soul. Oppressed his father and mother. More than them his lover. To his parents he was but irritable. His father left him alone and hoped slyly that God would play his trick. Sarah would often sigh as her son curtly brushed away her fond inquiries and suggestions for temptation of his poor appetite. He ate so little and was so thin, and his head, when she managed to pass her hand over his forehead, so hot. But she would bribe him back to health yet. When the time would be ripe, the Reverend Gershon Kishkenik, Minister of the new Highgate synagogue of which her Barnett was the recently elected warden, could be relied upon to attend to the matter. But meanwhile all was not yet well with their Davy. In the middle of her talking to him, he would run out of the house, his left sleeve dangling or thrust into its coat pocket. He would run out. He would find himself in the Bunny Club where he showed himself madly sane in a company that had agreed to be sanely mad. Or he would take his stand at Tottenham Road—Oxford Street corner, and stand there and endeavour to lose his individuality in the unceasing torrent of human beings which the war, in spite of its diabetic voracity, failed to diminish. The unending torrent of people seemed mankind’s one buckler against the grand onslaught of death. Of a Sunday he would hasten to the Lane, playground of his boyhood. The mere jostle of his body in the thickly swirling crowds round the stalls gave him a little ease and forgetfulness. Jews and Gentiles and sprinkling of richer-hued races. One humanity—ruled over, directed and inspired by his own. A self-world, an autocosm, complete, exemplary. Other times he sought refuge in London’s palace of thought. Soul-silence reigned there. The weighty hemisphere negated, nullified, despised, contemned the world of silly action beyond its gates. For the sake of the ministering attendants he would accept service of a book. But he did not read. He had no desire to read, no curiosity. He vied with Endor’s witch and Israel’s king, and summoned the spirits of the mighty dead. They penetrated into him. He ceased to think; sat passive, without unease, without pain, without remorse. Anything that compelled him to exercise will, decision, initiative, galled him. Galled him because of the assumption that he was not merely a fate-tossed bubble empty of determination and sin.

Old bonds drew David to Moses. Old bonds and a new revelation that the Master made of himself. Moses revealed himself anew to David. Gave him his philosophy of life. Reconciled Science and Judaism so lucidly that the lad forgot himself as he listened to the stammered exposition. Science pursued the Highest Common Factor of the universe of things. Once air, fire, water, atom—now proton, electron—energy. There was no longer matter as commonly known. All things were but forms of energy. He listened amazed as Moses quoted scientist after scientist, philosopher after philosopher, summarized and clarified and simplified. Atoms were worlds. Round a nucleus sun revolved or twisted the planetary electrons. Positive and negative energies. One element differed from another in the number of electrons and complication of nucleus that formed its atoms. Hydrogen, the lightest element has one planetary electron; helium, the next lightest, has two, lithium has three and so on to uranium, the heaviest element, which has ninety-two. There were therefore at least ninety-two elements; some of these had yet to be discovered; some were guessed. All matter was made up of elements. All elements were made up of atoms. All atoms were made up of energy. Whose? Judaism answers: God’s.

Moses spoke of animate as well as of inanimate. Of Evolution, the rock upon which Christianity is breaking among educated non-Romans. Just as the material world is built up of by addition of electron to electron, so is the spiritual world built up by the addition of perception to perception. In the thought-world matter was the nucleus, perception the electron, both together forming atoms of life, simple as hydrogen in plant, complicated as uranium in man. Consciousness is perception of perception, self-consciousness perception of one’s own consciousness, including the perception of self-consciousness in others.

All matter is energy. All life is perception. By whom perceived? Judaism again answers: God. There is no matter. There is only God manifesting himself in energy, perceiving himself in life. Lives His thoughts. From our limited human knowledge we find that thoughts live and are recallable during the whole life of the thinker. Our lives are made complete God-thoughts by death and live and are recallable for ever in God. The more important to God our lives the more likelihood of their frequently being recalled by Him. The wise man’s ambition here on earth is to make his life important to God, to realize himself fully, to thrust himself, as it were, upon God’s consciousness.

And as the individual creature so the group. Jews formed such a group and must realize themselves. Must help the world group to realize itself, to form a thought-harmony in God’s dynamic orchestra of self-realization. And the Jews needed a leader. The leader must be young so that he might live long enough to consolidate his work. He must be clever or his own folk would despise him. He must be cultured or the kings and cabinets of the world would ignore him. He must be brilliant or the masses would not listen to him. He must be hardened or he would bend and break. Above all he must be one who in his own body and soul had suffered the actual tragedy of the landless outcast Jew prevented from fulfilling his mission of explaining God in whom all had being.

The idea of the Jewish people gravely undertaking the professorial duty of explaining God as a mathematical Least Common Multiple to the nations nearly brought a laugh of sanity to David, as he sat by the schoolroom fire and smoked his pipe and pretended he didn’t recognize in the portrait the other drew of the leader his own crippled self. He filled his pipe again with newly acquired dexterity; Moses held a spill for him and spoke on, adding to the qualities of his leader that of loneliness. He must be lonely. Must be lonely so that he might devote his whole self to a task that demanded no less. And he must be spotless, without racial blemish.

Always the talk of Moses led up to that. Always. Till Davy began to feel himself impregnated with the Master’s fanatic logic. The universe became to him the visible manifestation of divinity. Ceremony, ritual practice, prayer and blessing, a system of God-remembering mnemonics. Himself the Jewish leader—young, clever, cultured, brilliant, hardened, soul-and-body suffering, lonely, without racial blemish, spotless. And he would try not to put his hand close to his eyes; not to jerk his fingers off his wrist, and he would clench his teeth hard to prevent mad screaming. He would rise up, say ‘Shalom!’ walk all the way from the East End to Kew Road where his parents, resigned to his nocturnal ramblings, would have retired to bed to lie sleepless until they heard his footsteps on the stairs.

And Nora’s light, too, was not switched off till she heard her beloved pass into the next room to hers. Then with a Latin prayer she would fall into unquiet sleep, in the middle of which she would often sense a crying and a weeping. She would wake with a Hebrew cry of alarm caught from Sarah. She would start up with the cry of ‘Sh’ma Yisroel!’ on her lips and crush her ear against the wall and overhear a stifled moaning of ‘Blood! Blood!’ and thereafter the hopeless wail of ‘Forgive me—forgive me—forgive—for——’

Some instinct told her that Moses was cunningly and fanatically impenetrating her Davy with the impossibility of his marrying her, a shikseh, a non-Jewess. Always after being with the master he most avoided her. But she put her trust in Barnett and Sarah and waited.

5. THE PLOT AGAINST THE CHURCH

Sarah and Nora had come very close together in the past year. At times the old Jewess acted as though the other was not a shikseh at all. She grew to love her as she would have loved little Leah the baby, on her be peace! Except for the cross round her neck Nora might just as well have been a Jewish girl. She was at home in all Jewish ways, had long ago forgotten the taste of un-Jewish food. Little more she would need to become a Jewish girl in reality.

That little more Barnett and Sarah tacitly conspired to provide. No more was the priest’s name mentioned by them. No more did Sarah exhort and encourage the girl in the practices of the Catholic faith. And she began to teach her little hidden things meet only for a Jewish bride. Laws of conjugal hygiene imparted intentionally in casual asides that caused the girl to blush hotly over her olive cheeks and shyly hide her strangely blue eyes with her flaxen eyelashes. Nora stored the imparted knowledge in a specially consecrated chamber of her mind—out of contact with the commonplaces of life. Without word between them she entered into the conspiracy of Barnett and Sarah to betray her faith.

One day Barnett left on her dressing table a Hebrew primer, self-explanatory. When she picked it up she smiled the first gay smile that had crossed her lips for months. She smiled at the waste of Barnett’s shilling. She knew more Hebrew than the child’s reader could teach her. Not only to needle Moses’ clothes and to Yost his speeches had she so often frequented the School for Hebrew. A sneaked primer often had enabled her to follow the little ones’ lessons. She had planned to provoke the master into a betrayal of affection by her zeal in mastering the stubborn Hebrew characters. In spite of his curious enmity to her, she knew that something in him reached out to her as something in her reached out to him. She had planned to strip his affection of its disguise by her little conceit. But then came the news of Davy’s death, then his return; and her nursing of him. And now Moses was not the same to her even as he had been. She still persisted in her visits to the schoolroom, but somehow he had given her no opportunity to play her little trick on him.

From a drawer she took out a Prayerbook in Hebrew and English. By this she knew the meaning of many of the prayers.

She opened the book and tested her reading.

‘Thou hast chosen us from all peoples, thou hast loved us and taken pleasure in us, and hast exalted us above all tongues; thou hast sanctified us by thy commandments and brought us near to thy service, O our King, and called us by thy great and holy name.’

She idly wondered whether the war would have been possible if all the world and not only Jews recognized God as the actual universal King. And then she read on, passive as to the music of a church organ, unmindful of the stupendous egoism of this handful of earth’s parasites.

‘Our God and the God of our fathers, reign thou in thy glory over the whole universe, and be exalted above all the earth in thine honour, and shine forth in the splendour and excellence of thy might upon all the inhabitants of the world, that whatsoever hath been made may know that thou hast made it, and whatsoever hath been created may understand that thou hast created it, and whatsoever hath breath in its nostrils may say: The Lord of Israel is King and his dominion ruleth over all. Make us holy with thy commandments and grant our portion in thy Law; satisfy us with thy goodness and gladden us with thy help. O purify our hearts to serve thee in truth, for Thou art God in truth, and thy word is truth, and endureth for ever. Blessed art thou, O Lord, King over all the earth, who hallowest Israel.’

She closed the book, kissed it as she had seen Sarah do, and put it back together with the superfluous primer. Then she sat down on her virgin bed and opened a consecrated chamber of her mind and drew therefrom all the older woman’s hints of things a Jewish bride must know. She crimsoned over her olive cheeks, and down over the dawn in her strangely blue eyes the curtains of her flaxen lashes drew.

6. HEROES

Catholic England was agog. The creation of an Englishman as the new Cardinal was sufficient of itself to set wagging tongue of priest and layman. But that was not all. His fiery sermons when still a young man were recalled. Their effect was remembered. Many a convert had he won. Many Anglo-Catholics had he brought to Rome. Among the souls he had saved were numbered many who bore great names in rank, scholarship and letters. His sudden self-exile was remembered. His flaming zeal in the far places of the earth, in Africa, in China. And always had he won souls. Stories of his victories for the Cross did not lose in their telling. Now when the war was making men think of death was the time to bear the fiery symbol of Rome and St. Peter up and down the country. Already the Anglo-Catholics as a body had shown a tendency for rapprochement. Now was the opportunity. Who should carry the cross? Who should head the mission? Who should attack the tottering citadel of non-Romish English Christianity? Who? Who but his Eminence, the new English Prince of the Church of Rome, Father Ignatius Darrel, hero of all Catholic England?

In truth there was some justification for the enthusiasm of the Romish in England. Protestant Christianity was not sure of itself. Its bishops contradicted one the other. One declared for the bread and wine as actual flesh and blood of Jesus. Another branded transubstantiation as heathen magic. And so with other dogmas such as the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth; even the very divinity of Jesus and his Son-hood were questioned and debated and left unsolved. Protestantism was split up into many sects, unlike Rome. Rome provided certainty in a Christianity of doubt. Nothing in Catholicism could be questioned. An irregular mission was already begun. At street corners. Oxford students jibed at Protestant difficulties. Opposed to flux the fixity of Peter’s rock. Intellectualism? Heresy. Once begin to question and nothing is safe—not even Christ. And without Christ one might as well be Jews—more or less.

So while the Church of England was starting to prepare a new prayer-book to appease all its inner critics (and which ultimately was turned down by a House of Commons that demanded of its members no allegiance to Christianity in any form) preparations were being made for the re-conquest of England by Rome. Aided from within, the new Roman invasion was to be headed by that hero of Catholic England, Ignatius Darrel.

But the Jews, too, were not to be without their hero. The name of David Cohen gradually crept into current conversation whenever and wherever Jews foregathered. The error of the War Office had been seized upon by the Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Press. His name became prominent. His brilliant University career was remarked again. It was found that he was a disciple of Mr. Moses. As an undergraduate he had addressed Zionist meetings under the Master’s auspices. It was remembered that he had proven himself eloquent, sincere, enthusiastic. Moses contributed an article, showing that it was incumbent on the Jewish people to be prepared with a delegate to the conference of the Powers that must follow the war. Patriotically he showed that England would win. Politically he showed that England for its own sake must control Palestine. A wonderful opportunity might then arise. He discarded the German offer to Jews of Palestine in the event of the Central Powers gaining the victory. Jews should pin their faith to England. The war might end any moment. An English delegate must be ready. He went on to describe his ideal delegate. He named none, but it was easy to recognize David Cohen from his description. The matter was discussed, the article commented on wherever Jews foregathered, pros and cons.

Upon all this came the gazetted news that the Victoria Cross was to be conferred on the subject under discussion for conspicuous valour on the field of battle. The most pacific of Jews thrilled at the news. There were no more pros and cons, only pros. The English Zionist Federation was ready with its delegate. The E.Z.F., on account of the war, was the centre of world-Zionism. Zionists all over considered themselves as acting for and representing the Jewish people. World-Jewry, therefore, might have been considered to have elected David Cohen to be its delegate to the world.

Moses was at last completely reconciled to God. He confessed that his life with all its suffering, bereavement and betrayal had been divinely directed that he might utilize his loneliness to fashion David Cohen, hero of England, into the Leader of Jewry. Only he realized he must be patient. It was hard to wait. There was such a deal he yet must impart to him. But soon he would be well again—soon—very soon.

Sarah was proud; and her pride was rosy-coloured with the hope that the hero’s health would now improve. Perhaps now his head would not be so hot. He would eat better. He would not be so irritable. He would stop that foolish habit of his of rubbing his fingers on his coat as if rubbing off a stain.

Barnett was vaguely suspicious. Was God trying with this paltry bribe to get out of making Davy properly well again? Otherwise he was not displeased. It would consolidate his own position in the community. He was ambitious, was Barnett Cohen. Levinson was no longer in his way. Since the news of his Ikey’s death he had retired from affairs, from business, from his grand house in Richmond and had buried himself somewhere in the East End. No one heard of him any more. A widower and childless, he simply fell out of the running.

Seated in an East End restaurant one day a poorly clad elderly gentleman was heard to shout out: ‘GOD, I DON’T FORGIVE YOU!’ Before attention could be focused upon him, Mr. Levinson, formerly of Jones and Levinson, died.

Barnett had little opposition in his immediate circle. He was now president of the synagogue. He wanted also to be a member of the Board of Deputies, the Anglo-Jewish communal parliament. To this there were some objections on account of his imperfect Englishry. Davy’s V.C. would cross all that out. No, Barnett was not displeased.

But it was Nora who felt supremely happy. It was as if a glad storm had blown and beaten down and utterly routed the still living and objecting qualms of her conscience. She had never been rid of them since the day she had tacitly acquiesced to Guardy’s and Mum’s treachery to her past.

‘Hero! Hero! David is a hero!’ sang a song of love triumphant in her heart and beat down and utterly routed qualms of convent-bred religious scruples.

The morning he was to go to the palace, Davy was strange. Barnett and Sarah and Nora were ready to accompany him and to share his glory. The Prince was to be there, and famous men. Suddenly David blurted out his resolution to refuse the damned thing. Yes, damned. Sarah took refuge in tears. Nora said nothing but looked reproach in his eyes. Barnett raged like his old self. Moses came in. He also intended to accompany the hero. The hero turned upon him and glared at him. Moses scrutinized the overwrought boy. He saw what the others did not see. He saw that before the day was over the crisis in the vehement brain would have come and gone. And he was glad. It had lasted all too long. The sooner the crisis was over and done with the sooner would David get better, normal. The proceedings that day, the decoration at the palace, the civic presentation at the Guildhall, later in the afternoon, would loosen or even break the curb of restraint that hitherto had prevented his disciple from ridding himself of the load on his soul. Something probably connected with the gallant deed that had gained for him his V.C. He set himself to calm the boy into accepting the duties of the day. While Barnett raged Moses talked, quietly, stammeringly, but effectively. He had not lost his old power over the lad. David sullenly withdrew his resolution. He would go. But nobody must come with him; nobody. Neither his father nor his mother nor Nora nor the Master; nobody. From this he did not budge. Sarah stopped crying and began to doff her finery. Nora accepted the decision meekly and helped Sarah. Moses was content. Only Barnett raged, and raged all the more that none seemed to mind him much. He consoled himself with the heap of newspapers he had accumulated anent his son’s heroism. After assisting Sarah, Nora—free that day from hospital duty—took from Moses a speech of his to type. She looked on the Master’s worn, anxious face and determined her portable should not work that day and that she should be compelled to make use of his old, funny, but dependable Yost.

That morning, some days before he was due, a high dignitary of the Church of Rome arrived in England and took immediate train to London. In his carriage he confessed to himself that at last the craving to look once again on the child of his loins had proved the stronger over scourge and shirt of hair and Christ. His one night of love—he now confessed—he had never erased from his memory, and the face of his child had never ceased to haunt him. For penance he had all these years never permitted himself to think of her in waking. He had left sufficient in Barrow’s Bank to cover all her possible expenses for nearly all her life. He had determined—for penance—never to think of her, never to hear of her—in vain. She grew upon him in dreams of the night. Her face and form changed ever as changes a desert mirage. But, according to proverb, the more it changed the more it was intrinsically the same. And it had been a madness, a torment hellish in its irritation, not to know what her features were like precisely. Little details such as the colour of her eyes he had actually forgotten. Were they blue like his own or black-brown like her mother’s? Was her chin dimpled—or smooth like his? And her hair, it used to be—what? But the priest no longer feared for his sanity. Soon he would know. Soon he would see her. He would go straight to the convent. They knew her as his niece. She should be his niece. He would take a house whence he could direct his campaign. He would take up his residence in London. She should live with him. He almost smiled to himself at the near prospect of meeting his co-guardian, that tailor of a Jew, Barnett Cohen. He had written to him. He would have to recompense him for his trouble, though what trouble he could have had with the child he could not imagine. He had left her well provided; very well provided. She should live with him; help to spend his money. He was by no means poor. He hoped she might not marry. At least not for some time. He would be miserly with her society. He would no longer be alone. All the loneliness of all the years he had been out of sight of his child pressed upon him. He would no longer be alone; soon—soon.

The train stopped. He took a taxi on the platform. As he surrendered his ticket he gave the driver the address of the convent.

7. THE KISS OF THE SHIKSEH

From heathen example-magic is derived the series of world-wide customs celebrating with fire and lights the sun’s increase in heat and illumination from mid-winter onward. With the change in religious belief change the meanings of these old heathen rituals. Yuletide becomes Xmas. So in days of old in Judea. The irradicable custom was utilized to illustrate the delivery of the Jews under the Maccabees from the darkness of Hellenism. That ancient conservative Rabbi, Shammai, attempted to twist the custom back to front in order to eliminate the heathen superstition. He wanted to defy nature. The heathen sun-worshippers gradually increased their illuminations to demonstrate ocularly to the sun how he should behave. Shammai wanted Jews to show that they held no candle to the sun. Their lights should diminish, not increase. His opponent, the popular Hillel, was more indulgent and carried the day. So that down to present times Jews celebrate the mid-winter victory of the Maccabees over the Syrian Hellenists by an eight-day semi-holiday, wherein one light is lit the first evening, two the second, and so on. And in schools for Hebrew the story is retold by pedants and pedagogues and fanatics for all things Jewish who, like Mr. Moses, after ordinary school hours, sweat young Jewry and stubborn their little hearts and stiffen their little necks against the dominant faith—whatever it is.

The ceremonial lights flickering on the mantelpiece over the fire in Moses’ School for Hebrew were three. It was the third evening of Chanucah. The room was filled with the buzz of preparatory study. From the very first the Master had instituted the group system. So he was restricted to no class. Pedagogues will understand. The teacher could even absent himself awhile. Moses was not in the schoolroom. He had retired for a few minutes behind the hangings into his den or sanctuary or hell. Just now it was his sanctuary. On the left were his books, near them his chair-bed; in the centre an American-cloth covered eating and working table. On his right another chair and table, a smaller one on which stood his old Yost upon which, failing Nora, he would type his speeches and articles for Judaism, for Zionism. By the Yost on the floor was a clumsy hectograph that he used, to make multiple copies of lesson-notes for his scholars.

Moses was standing before the centre table. It was the third evening of Chanucah. Also the anniversary of the death of his Rachel. Anniversary too of the treachery of his other Rachel. It was when he had returned from the Shtiebel where he had gone to say kaddish for his dead dear one’s soul that he had found that scribbled, tear-stained letter, pitifully brief, but all too long for happiness to survive. On the table a little wick raised its tiny light from a tumbler of oil—the Jewish death-light. When the scholars had learned their hour or two and gone, Moses would pass into the shtiebel and once more recite the kaddish for Rachel his wife—and—since he could not of late fight against the memory of her as he had been wont to do—for Rachel his child. God must not hold him guilty of disloyalty, of becoming an accessory after the fact of her treachery. He was old and tired and could no longer rage so grimly, bitterly.

Meanwhile the buzz continued on the other side of the hangings. Moses stood bowed before the death-light. His lips moved. Above the buzz no word of his could be heard for some time. Then:

‘She was your image, darling, and I worshipped her more than my God. And God, in His jealousy, snatched her . . . God! See, God, how lonely I am—tired . . . O, I am lonely, Rachel! Lonely, my other Rachel! . . . Baruch dayan emess! Blessed be the true Judge! The glory of Zion is coming, but I do not wish to see it, darling. I am lonely . . . tired . . . Would I were already with you, darling. A little longer . . . patience . . . a little longer till Davy’s feet tread firm the Zion road . . . ah, Rachel—Rachel. . . .’

Of a sudden the schoolroom became a scene of wild excitement. The scholars left their places and crowded round a girl with flaxen hair, olive face, red lips and strangely blue eyes. Children know a lot more than adults imagine. They did not know that Nora was a shikseh. They did know that she followed their lessons with sneaked text-book hid under typewriting table. They knew also that she was Davy Cohen’s girl. They knew a great many things. And they crowded round her and laughed and screamed and cheered. And from the babel rose questions eager, breathless, impatient:

‘Did he make a speech?’

‘Did he shake hands with the Prince?’

‘Of course! Was the King there?’

‘What did the Lord Mayor say?’

‘Were you there?’

‘Of course! What did HE say?’

‘Three cheers for Davy Cohen, old boy! HIP——’

‘HIP-HIP-HURRAY! HURRAY! HURRAY!’

The clamour was deafening, piercing, but the Master, roused rudely from his reverie, was not displeased. The older children of Israel would also cheer their leader after this fashion when——

‘Is he coming here?’

‘Isn’t he coming to give us a speech—in his old cheder?’

‘Speech! Speech! We WILL have a speech. Speech! Speech!’

‘Won’t he show his V.C.?’

‘Three cheers for our own V.C.! Hurray! Hurray! HURRAY!’

The clamour was piercing, deafening, but the Master, the other side of the curtain, smiled. Young Israel would be a great instrument in the hand of the new master of Israel.

‘Hush! hush!’ came to him the shikseh’s voice. ‘I don’t know! How can I answer you all at once? I don’t know! Get on with your work and don’t worry the Master. He might. No. Yes. He was there. Go on with your work, you naughty boys.’

The children of Israel murmured. And then returned unsatisfied to their studies. The buzz again rose from the disgruntled groups as the hangings parted and Nora apologized to Moses with a lie on her red lips.

‘My machine’s got something the matter with its innards,’ she smiled ingratiatingly, as she held out his speech-script. ‘So I’ve come to click it off on that famous old Yost of yours. Wonderful machine that. Never gets out of order. Alignment always right, too. And no ribbon to mess with.’

Moses looked at her, and a troubled expression crept into his grey face. He did not answer her. He let her babble on.

‘O! and while I’m here I’ll mend that buttonhole in your woollen shirt and darn those socks I left last time. And O! I tried my hand at some cakes and they’re no good, so I’ve brought them to you. Egg and flour and butter and essence of lemon and cherries, that’s all. They might kill but not till a hundred years after you’ve eaten them. So you’re fairly safe. O! I met Rodman. He was there——’

She was determined to make him respond to her chatter, and succeeded. She paused deliberately to provoke him into question, into speech with her. Rodman had been there, had told her how Davy had carried himself, how it had all gone off. Rodman was an amazingly brilliant nerve specialist and Davy’s friend and doctor. The Master was atremble to know how the day had passed for Davy. She paused deliberately and provoked him to speech, to questioning of her.

‘Well?’ he demanded grudgingly. He would not give way to the shikseh’s wiles more than he could help.

‘O! all right,’ replied Nora disappointed, and turned from him to the typewriter. ‘About the palace business I don’t know. In the Guildhall, Rodman says, he was at his old game—rubbing his fingers on his coat and all that, and holding his hand to his eyes. When he should have responded, Rodman signalled to the chairman who pulled him down by his coat and led off the cheering, so that there was no scene. And then he slipped away and Rodman couldn’t get to him.’

She turned sulkily to the typewriter, then glanced quickly at the old man’s grey, tired face and repented. She determined to fetch him a chop from Kew Road the next day. She knew how to do it for him on his gas-ring, just a rub of garlic in the frying pan. She smiled to him.

‘Don’t worry, Master. He’ll be all right. Perhaps he’s coming here to tell you all about it.’ She was determined to soften him. She went up to him and did what she had never yet dared to do—kissed him. He started back, blushing like a raw adolescent. His lower lip dropped. Memories of his daughter crowded upon him, pressed down upon him. He thrilled against his will, held on to the hangings and tried to push the warm young life away from him with feeble thrusting. But her red lips had touched him, her olive smooth cheeks had pressed against his, her flaxen curls had hovered over his silk-covered thin white hair. He could not get over that. And her blue eyes—her strangely blue eyes—they laughed to him as might laugh the eyes of a child—a grandchild. She was pushing him with gentle, affectionate authority through the hangings. Her red lips were saying something to him, smiling to him.

‘You go in to the children, Master. They don’t disturb me, you know. I’ll “yost” through your wonderful speech quite comfy. You won’t recognize it after I’ve done with it. Go on!’ and she pushed him through into the schoolroom.

Nora, alone, gave way to a queer whim. The death-light made her think of those two Rachels of the Master; the loyal and disloyal. She felt a queer, powerful sympathy with them both. Her unpremeditated affection for the old man she had always nominated pity—pity for his lonely old age. For his ideals, for his fanatic Judaism, Zionism, she in very truth cared not overmuch—as little as she cared for her guardian’s rumoured mission to convert England back to Catholicism. The mother of the convent she had lately neglected had met her, and gently reproached her and told her the news. Her uncle-guardian might be expected over any day now. Nora did not remember him. She had lately thought very little about him. Last night, though, she had had a nasty nightmare. Two enormous giants embodied in irresistible mountain-powers had taken hold of her by either arm and, with the gradual inevitability of dreams, were slowly tearing her in two. She had looked from one enormous rock-hewn face to the other and had been scared to shrieking by their absolute indifference to herself, victim and object of their rivalry. One face she knew. It was the face of Moses, grim, old, grey, a rock. The other face, too, was grim, rock-like, not so old, not so grey. It was her guardian’s. She recognized it but could not, on waking, define her cognition. She was being inevitably torn in two between them when she awoke to hear Davy stumble into his room from his nocturnal rambling. Later on in the night she heard his moan of ‘Blood! Blood!’ and then the final wail of ‘Forgive me—forgive me—forgive—for——’

She came back to herself watching the death-light that Moses had kindled for his Rachels. No; big things had little interest for her, made little demands on her sympathy. Little things had power over her. The little things of life—such as the Master’s self-neglect in food and clothes, or even his outbreaks of stammering excitement. These drew her and caught at her heart. Came to her fancies of that young bride of his youth—Rachel. How they must have loved one another! She, had she survived her fatal first childbirth, would never have let him so neglect himself. And that daughter, his other Rachel. How could she have had the heart to leave her father like that—her father and her faith and everything just for—

Here she caught herself face to face with a mocking query.

Would not she—she who stood there condemning unheard the daughter of Moses and Rachel—would not she do the same?—WAS she not ready and eager to do the same?

She gave way to her whim. She removed the death-light to the typewriting table ere she began to click at Moses’ speech.

8. THE LAW OF MOSES

Moses regarded his children of Israel. For an hour or two each day he succeeded in drawing them out from the bondage of Gentile culture. In English schools little Jews were taught to be Englishmen. In French schools little Jews were taught to be Frenchmen. In German schools little Jews were taught to be Germans. In American schools little Jews were taught to be Americans. Only in such schools for Hebrew as Moses provided were little Jews taught to be Jews. Mountains of Sinai in the wilderness of the world—beacons of the God of Israel, these schools for Hebrew.

I am the Lord thy God—he taught his little Jews—Who brought you out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage. In every age celebrated the Jew an ever-recurring Passover. Did not the Death Angel ever visit the nations that oppressed Israel? Did not Egypt die and Amalek and Moab and Phillistia and Babylon and Syria and Persia and Greece and Macedonia and Rome and Spain?—and Czarist Russia, too, home of pogrom, was on the Death Angel’s list, perhaps. And Kaisered Germany, home and birthland of a modern anti-semitism. Out of the house of bondage. Always the Death Angel passed over the blood-flecked Jewish door-posts. Only freemen could serve God. God saw to it that his Jews were never overlong enslaved nor that their enslavers long escaped their doom. Out of the house of bondage. One could not be free where all were enslaved. Jews would only be completely free when all the world was freed—freed from its servitude to delusions, falsities, idols.

Thou shalt have no other gods before Me! The worshipper took after his god. Who worshipped idols died with them. Each people flamed with its own god-genius. As the god died so died the flame, so died the people. The Jewish flame was the flame of the Burning Bush that burned and burned and never was consumed. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. You cannot worship together God and gods. Nothing belonged to Cæsar, everything to God. Only when mankind was one in God would mankind be one.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. This the sin of the Gentile. He cheated himself by calling lies with the name of truth, his Jingoes with the name of God, flesh and blood with the name of the Lord God of Israel. Too enslaved, too oppressed by materialism to discover his own cheat.

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Halt and consider that relative to God there is little if any difference between white and red and brown and black and yellow. Between man and ox and ass. The Sabbath day. First slave-freeing charter. Religion of labour enunciated. Socialism. All were equal in God, Maker of earth and sea and sky, man and ox and ass and the stranger within the gates.

Honour thy father and thy mother. Socialism; not anarchy. Evolution; not revolution. Continuity of tradition whereby Israel survived in length of days to reach out once again towards the land which the Lord his God had sworn a gift to his fathers. Continuity of tradition, of life.

Thou shalt not kill. Jewish worship of life challenging Gentile worship of Death. ‘The best of the Gentiles is devoted to killing,’ said the Rabbis. With their best brains they multiplied the volume of Moloch sacrifices. The East End scribe had sung:

Mad circle of death. Nature of wilderness red in tooth and claw. And a voice crying in the wilderness the challenge of the Jewish God of Life: Thou shalt not kill! Not only the body but the soul, too.

Thou shalt not be soul-dirty. The soul was affected by the body. Generation was holy. Degeneration foul. Circumcision sealed the Jew’s body for God’s purposes. Ye shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy.

Thou shalt not steal. The positive precepts were summed up in the commandment to love one’s neighbour like one’s self. Each had equal right to self-realization. The negative precepts might be summed up in ‘Thou shalt not encroach upon thy neighbour’s right to self-realization.’ Thou shalt not steal. The present war was but an outbreak of violent theft, culmination of years of quiet stealing, of subtle encroachment on the equal rights of others to self-realization. When strong nations stole from weak, there were little wars or none. When strong nations encroached upon strong nations then flamed the fires of war—war to end war, forsooth!

Thou shalt not bear false witness. But how otherwise would the few gull the many into throwing themselves into the shambles? The newspapers lied—and so—and so—and so they died! sang the East End scribe.

Thou shalt not covet. Death could never satisfy a mankind made for life. Heart-hungry humanity yearned and coveted; and lied; and stole; and slew soul and body; and revolted from one slavery to another; restless, sabbathless; cheated itself with God-named Jingoes; worshipped lying idols; and still made bricks for tyrants in its houses of bondage.

So, more simply than the writer has summarized, taught Moses the Law to the Children of Israel. Much of his teaching went right over their little heads preoccupied with marbles in their season, and nuts and tops and piggies. Yet something of his teaching seared into them. And, not too comprehendingly, they sensed the red-hot single-mindedness, the white-hot sincerity, the flaming zeal of this Moses, fanatic teacher in Israel.

9. THE NUMBERING IN THE WILDERNESS

The register was called and the children answered to their names.

‘Nathan ben Levi.’ And a little shrill treble answered: Hinenni! (Here I am).

‘Jacob ben Hillel.’ Hinenni! ‘Baruch ben Joshua.’ Hinenni! ‘Abraham ben Isaac.’ Hinenni! Moses called the register. Numbered his children of Israel. These and such as these are the names of the children of Israel. Not Marmaduke. Not Edward or Sidney or Tom or Gregory. Isaac and Abraham and Jacob. Moses and Aaron and Joshua. So evidently thought Moses the Jewish fanatic as he called out the Hebrew names of Jack Hillary, Barnett Jones, Abe Thompson, etc. And as he called the names, passed in his mind in semi-conscious review many who had passed out into the world from his school for Hebrew. Not all had been true. Not all had kept the faith. Some had slipped by the wayside, tempted by the lusts of Peor. Some had forgotten his teachings. But many, most, had not forgotten, had not succumbed to the temptations of the lusts of Peor, had not slipped by the wayside, had kept the faith, had been true. True, faithful Children of Israel. Disciples of Moses. Ready when the ram’s horn sounded to leave the fleshpots of Egypt. Ready to dare the wilderness. Ready to answer cheerily the cry of the Zion. Of these were many. Like—‘David ben Baruch!’ he called. Hinenni! answered a ten-year old. Hinenni! answered also a harsher, stronger voice. Moses looked up from his register to meet the fevered glance of him whom the king that day had delighted to honour.

The clicking behind the hangings halted and went on again.

The children in their groups flashed their bright faces round to the door, ready to throw discipline to the winds and mob their hero as he stood in the doorway. But something in his eyes, in the working of his face, in the twitching of his lips, kept them in their places. But they kept their glances glued on the bronze decoration on his blue serge jacket. The Victoria Cross. Why wasn’t he gay? Why didn’t he laugh, smile to them? What was the matter with him? And then the sight of his empty sleeve offered a reasonable excuse for him. He had been wounded. He had lost an arm. He was in pain. He was a hero not to cry. That was why his face worked, his mouth twitched and his eyes glared. He was in pain. And the eyes of some of the youngsters filled for him. Poor hero!

He had slipped away. Immediately after the Guildhall ceremony. If he had not slipped away he would have—would have—would have— But he had slipped away. And after a while he had found himself on the steps to the schoolroom. Before the door he had heard his name called out and he had opened the door and had answered it. It was foolish of him. He was not the only David son of Barnett in Israel just as he was not the only David Cohen in his regiment. Or in Kew Road. But he was here. He felt like a schoolboy again as the master looked at him from the register. Why not? He would be. He wouldn’t disturb the master’s work. He quietly made his way to a corner where some older boys were studying Isaiah. He took his seat amongst them and coached them and solved their difficulties and became calm. Gradually the buzz of the groups arose again. The master’s attention was drawn away from Davy by little Benny Mendelson who lifted his hand and protested tearfully:

‘Please, Master, de place runned away while Jacky was reading!’ So it had. Moses spoke to the little group leader, found Benny’s place and overheard Davy explaining carefully to his group that the Hebrew word almah meant ‘a young woman’—not ‘a virgin’ as the English Bibles had it. But Benny Mendelson was not at ease. He plucked at the master’s coat.

‘Please, Master, you promised to tell us the story of Chanucah to-day!’ So he had.

‘Close your books,’ Moses commanded. ‘Not that way, Isaac. Right side up is the Jewish way. Now listen.’

While the children listened and Moses retold the ancient tale of the Maccabbean wars, of the handful of Jews that defeated the greatest military power of its day, Davy shrank back in his corner and listened also. Listened until he gave, furtively, way to the absolute necessity of rubbing that stain from his hand. But the maddening part of it was that the more he rubbed the more the blood spread over his fingers. He examined closely the curious phenomenon. Yes. The stains were dry. And yet they spread. There must be a means of ridding himself of those bloody fingers. He would try to shake them off. Not openly. Secretly. So that he should not disturb the master. Or the children. They might not like him shaking his fingers off in the schoolroom. No. That little Benny Mendelson was looking at him. He would wait until he turned his great childish eyes to the master. Now.

‘And so,’ summarized Moses, ‘—we proved ourselves once again God’s stiff-necked people. We were the only people that understood the importance of God. We were the only people that knew that only by understanding the importance of God could the world be saved, could the nations be saved from at last killing each other out. If we had given in there would have been none left to save the world at the last. Because unless the world learns from us to believe in God, the nations will one day kill each other out. Like this: When God is understood to be the king of all the world, the world will be all one country. And there will be no wars. And instead of such a lot of money being wasted all over for killing people, all that money will go to help people to live. The world will be happier. If two groups have an argument, they won’t be allowed to kill each other about it. They’ll go to a court where judges who know the law of God, the king of the world, will say who is right and who wrong. And there the matter would end. Fighting to settle anything’s so foolish. Supposing one of you big boys had an argument with one of you little ones. And supposing the big boy knocked down the little boy. Would you say that because he knocked him down the big boy was righter? All it would prove would be that the big boy was bigger—and we knew that before. That’s exactly what war does. War——’

‘STOP!’

10. THE CRISIS

‘Stop!’ cried Davy and pushed his way hurriedly to the other end of the room and turned his back on Moses and faced the startled children.

‘Stop!’ he cried a third time and held up his hand. ‘I’m the master!’ he spluttered excitedly, a mad lustre in his sunken eyes. ‘I’m the master!’ he laughed grotesquely so that the children huddled together at the look on his face and the sound of his voice. And as he laughed, Moses drew himself taut. The crisis he had half-feared, half hoped for, was at hand, and he would have to deal warily. Another, too, heard the laughter, and ceased her clicking.

‘I’m the master, boys! Not him—not the master! I’m the master who can tell you about battles and wars, eh boys? What does the master know of war? Listen to me, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what war’s like. Me! A hero! A gallant hero—gallant hero—gallant hero—the prince said—the general said—the Lord Mayor said—the papers said—me—fought for his king and country—me—this—this—this V.C.—this V.C.—this V.C.——’

And he tore it off his breast and dashed it down and stamped on it and cried hoarsely, harshly, gratingly:

‘God! O God! O God! I didn’t mean it! Didn’t mean it! I was mad—mad—mad—a wild beast—howling—stabbing—tearing—mad—MAD, I TELL YOU—mad—and—and drunk—DRUNK, I TELL YOU—and—and—when I came to myself—OI! OI!—“SH’MA YISROEL!” he screamed as I stuck it in his throat! His eyes—HIS EYES—as he croaked “sh’ma yisroel—sh’ma——” ’

His voice mumbled into an incoherent moan, and David Cohen, leader-elect of all Israel, swayed to his knees, twisted and writhed and grovelled at the master’s feet and whined:

‘I didn’t mean it! Master, I didn’t mean it! Forgive me! Absolve me! Take it away! The blood—blood—blood!’

Moses motioned silently to the frightened, huddling children. To the mad moaning of the writhing figure at the master’s feet they shuffled out, and their footsteps on the stairs slurred into silence. Nora sat at the typewriter, her eyes on the flickering death-light, a cold ache in her heart.

Only half a thousand yards away, His Eminence the newly-created English cardinal was closeted with the mother superior of a convent, eagerly seeking explanation of his—his niece’s absence. Gratefully he heard that she was well, that the mother herself had met only a few months ago and had reproached her gently for her neglect in visiting her old convent. O yes. She looked well cared for. And well-dressed. She was living with her guardian, Mr. Cohen. With difficulty His Eminence restrained himself from asking the colour of her eyes—her hair—whether her chin was smooth or—but no. He would wait till he saw her with his own eyes. He learned for the first time of the failure of Barrow’s Bank and what this Cohen must have done for the child. But he had his chequebook. He was not a poor man. He was rich on his own account, and the Church was not niggardly to its faithful servants. Where did this Cohen live? Not in the East End? Where then? Hadn’t the girl left her address with them? Couldn’t they find it? How foolish to lose addresses! Let it be looked for again. It must be about. Must be.

Moses looked down on the grovelling lad. He would need to act warily. The lad himself had given him his cue when he had mingled with the boys like one of them. That was the cue. No time now for pity. He had expected something of the kind. Not the first time, probably, that such illustration had been vouchsafed to the anomalous position of the Jew in the firing line. Moses disentangled his legs from the boy’s arm, passed through the curtains, made no comment on Nora’s meddling with the death-light, did not even look to the rigid shikseh. From the centre table he took a little pile of exercise-books, re-entered the schoolroom, sat himself at his desk and set himself coolly to mark the errors of his children of Israel.

For a minute he marked away, while Davy still mumbled of forgiveness and absolution and blood. Then Moses spoke.

‘David,’ he said in tones cold, slow, deliberate and stammering. ‘D-David, I am s-surprised at you. S-surprised at you. To c-come and d-disturb me in my work and to f-frighten all my ch-children away——’

At the sound of the cold pedagogic tones, the hero sobbed like a little child.

‘Davy!’ he heard his master’s voice raised in anger. ‘DAVY!’ the master’s voice was stern, peremptory, and the hero lifted up a white and tragic face. There was no sympathy in the face of Moses. He did not even look away from his work. From those averted features came only the scolding command:

‘Pick up that cross, you FOOL!’

David slowly swayed to his knees with the cross in his hand. With a miserable boyish look he appealed silently to Moses. Moses still did not turn his head to him. David stumbled to his feet and was greeted with:

‘Pin it back, you young idiot!’

Under the spell he fumbled with his one hand and failed. His helplessness brought anew the tears in his eyes. Tears of weakness, of childish self-pity. They rolled down his thin cheeks, wetted his dry lips. Moved them to frame his appeal for assistance in the old boyish way.

‘Please, Master!’

And now Moses changed his tactics. He left his exercise-books, took gentle hold of the quivering figure, petted it, patted it, replaced the cross on its breast and spoke to David’s heart.

‘Poor boy! See. I’ll fasten it back myself. And you must promise me you won’t be foolish in your talk any more. We would be fools not to make use of this thing, wouldn’t we? You don’t seem to realize the amount of sentimental power latent in this bit of metal. You will so typify our people, maimed and crushed in the quarrels of the nations—alien quarrels. Your broken body and even darkened mind will plead better than elaborate orations. Soon, very soon, perhaps, the world will have bled itself out of its fever. And then the destiny of our people will be in your hands, David, in your hands——’

Here Moses made a slip.

‘No! No!’ screamed once more David, the mad light burning again in the sunken, bloodshot eyes. ‘No! NO! My hands are bloody with Jewish blood. The brand of Cain is on them—the brand of Cain—the brand of Cain! Blood—blood!’ and he stared at his fingers, and shuddered, and flung them in the face of Moses, and wailed: ‘Master! Master! Absolve me! Absolve me! Take it away! Take it away! The blood! The blood! From my hands—hands—hands!’

Moses regretted his slip; then regretted his regret. All the better. Let nothing remain choked back in the lad’s mind. The sooner all was out on the surface and fought to annihilation the sooner would the lad recover his old sanity. The fires of hardening. Moses turned back to his exercise-books and replied with deliberate cruelty:

‘Hands? You’re mad, Davy. You don’t know what you’re talking about. If it’s any consolation to you, you might realize that, anyway, you’ve only one hand to clean.’

But poor Davy was in a paroxysm of terror. The sweat streamed down his haggard face. His one hand clutched at the master’s lapel. He appealed, threatened, commanded as he cried, shouted, shrieked:

‘Absolve me!’ the mad voice rang in the ears of Nora, rigid behind the hangings. ‘Absolve me! ABSOLVE ME!’

But Moses tore his lapel roughly from the clawing clutch, thrust his own pity deep down into his sledgehammering heart, regarded coldly the collapse of the raving body of the lad as it fell to the floor like a suddenly released half-emptied sack, and jeered down at him:

‘Go to the Christians if you must have human absolution. Coward! Can’t you look God in the face without a Pope to put his opaquity between you? And while I’m on the subject, this too. Kindly remember that this shikseh business with that girl Nora had better be cut right out. A Jewish leader this time must be absolutely unsuspect. He must be the representative of all sections, including the strict orthodox. So cut the girl right out. Not that I’ve anything against her. But she is not of the race. I have a suspicion that your father and mother are planning to yiddish her. It won’t do. For anyone else, yes. For you, no. Before I go let me congratulate you. I know my Jews. You are sick. You are crippled. You are mad. You are therefore the most perfect representative of the Jewish people. I congratulate you. As you’ve robbed me of my scholars, I’m going down to the Shtiebel. I have yahrzeit for my wife. I’ll let Reb Zalman know what a nice, steady, brave Jewish hero we have. And later in the evening I’ll be over in Kew Road to see if you’ve spoilt your perfection by regaining your senses.’

He received no reply from the shaking heap on the floor. Before he left his schoolroom, Moses turned round and added:

‘You can take your time, Davy. You can lie there till the caretaker throws you out.’

He shut the door after him and made his way to the Shtiebel. Half-way he thought a clergyman stared at him. But the man, whose face was in the shadow of the street-lamp, passed him by after a momentary halt.

Nora paused, her figure bent, her red lips hovering over the prone lad’s hair. She understood now. Everything. A moment later the schoolroom door had shut softly after her.

David felt a motion in his hair—a something sweet and familiar. He staggered to his feet like a drunken man; felt creeping over him the ultimate madness, sullen, continuous, everlasting. Against it that other will, usually assistant beside him, was of no avail. The blankness encroached swiftly. He tried to recall a magic word that would keep it off. A word that something sweet and familiar just now had suggested to his rapidly emptying mind. Ah! Yes, that was it—

‘Nora!’ he called, and laughed idiotically.

1. RELAPSE

THAT East End scribe, of whom mention has already too frequently been made, saw a strange sight in Bishopsgate the night of the day when Davy was so honoured for his valour by his king and country. He saw the hero stride with haggard, vacant face across the road, pause in a closed shop-doorway, take out several pipes from his pocket and choose one ready filled. He then saw him attempt with a petrol-less lighter to start the tobacco going, saw a tall clergyman approach and offer a lighted match. In the flare he saw the clergyman start, and falter a question. He saw the hero nod, at first indifferently, then more and more eagerly, violently. Soon the strange pair walked slowly off, the clergyman listening attentively with bent head, the other speaking rapidly, feverishly.

Darrel had left the convent after a prolonged but fruitless search for Barnett Cohen’s address. Before leaving he had bethought himself of looking in the telephone book. But the convent possessed no telephone. He left to find one. It was already late. He went to Liverpool Street Station, the one closest by. But there were so many B. Cohens on the phone that he left the station in irritable despair. Walking a little way he determined to go back to the station telephone. He would ring every B. Cohen up until he found the right one. He turned back. In a dim shop-doorway he noticed an armless man trying to light his pipe. Always on a journey Darrel carried a box of matches. He had just come from a journey. He thrust his hand in his pocket, drew out the box and approached the one-armed man. Struck a match for him and held it to his pipe. The flare blazed upon a bit of bronze on the cripple’s breast. Darrel offered a word of reverent admiration. Suddenly he remembered reading in the paper of to-day’s decoration at the palace. A Jewish V.C. A Cohen. David Cohen. Was it—could it be—? He ventured a leading question. The other responded blankly, indifferently. There was something queer about him. He tried him again. Mentioned the name of his—his niece. Nora? The other looked up, nodded. The priest gave his own name. Mentioned he was Nora’s uncle—guardian. And that he was going to her, to take her away to live with him, to stay with him, to keep house for him. Mentioned he was in England on a great mission-drive. To bring souls back to Christ. Weary souls. Sinful souls. To be eased and cleansed by Christ. By this time they were walking on together. David was nodding his head wisely. Yes, he understood. To be eased, to be cleansed. Christ . . . er . . . Christ could cleanse hands from blood, couldn’t He? The priest regarded the man at his side with a keen side-glance. He was queer. He mumbled. The priest recognized a nerve-shattered soul by his side. A strong youth broken by stronger burden of sin. A weighed-down soul frantic with effort to unburden itself. He glimpsed again a moment of the past. When face to face with that Moses he had accepted a contemptuous challenge. A challenge thrown out not only to him but to his Christ. And the priest crossed himself in gratitude of the divine favour. God’s grace. Sign of God’s grace regained. His years of loneliness, of penance, of hard labour in Christ’s vineyard, of flesh-conquest, had been accepted in atonement of his one red sin. And this sign given to him on the threshold of Nora’s relinking her life with his! Darrel offered up a prayer and a vow. He and his child would consecrate their new life together by winning this distracted hero-soul for Christ.

He was a priest, well-experienced in the psychology of the nerve-wrecked. He knew what to say. He knew how to say it. As they walked along he drew from Davy the whole miserable tale. Davy was not proof against the other’s gentle sympathy and intuitive comprehension. They provoked reaction against the Master’s flinty jeering. They provoked a flood of overwrought, heart-easing tears and voluble confidences. The priest soon knew all. All about the tragedy of the Jew in the firing line. All about the Jew-killing Jew episode. All about the fever-clamour for absolution. All. They walked, and the lad babbled on.

The priest hailed a passing taxi and inquired casually his address from Davy. They got in. In the close proximity of the cab Darrel spoke gentle, healing words. Words that did not lash and bite like the Master’s. Words overrunning with hope and comfort. God was a merciful God and knew that men were prone to sin and blood. Mankind had fallen, but there was a way of rising, a means of salvation. In his infinite mercy God had granted mankind a Saviour. None less than Himself in the Person of His Only Son the Lord Jesus Christ. Like man for whose sake He came, He was born of woman. Suffered more than any man born of woman ever did or ever might suffer. Died the death of the ignoble in order with His death to atone as with a sacrifice for the sins of all men. His blood, sprinkled on the altar of His Father, atoned for all human trespasses against the Father. And all who took fast hold of Jesus Christ, that is, all who believed in Him, had their sins washed clean away. In the blood of the Lamb was the heart of blood made pure, the hand of blood made clean.

A cunning crept into Davy’s eyes as he listened to the priest. His features ceased their twitching. His mouth—his whole body—more peaceful, relaxed. He listened on greedily.

The priest spoke of his niece, Nora. In the shadow of the taxi, Davy smiled a cunning little smile. He knew, but never mind. Casually stressed the priest the obvious objection to his niece’s marrying a non-Christian. The impossibility of such a thing. A stammered word of the lad had given the priest his cue.

While the taxi was nearing Kew Road, Sarah and Barnett and Nora were making a pretence at supper. Sarah regretted the old days in her present prosperity. The old days before the coming of the shikseh. She had grown to love the girl. True. Nevertheless it had been better before she had come into their lives. Then she had had her husband, her son and Leah the baby. She had had her little home and her scrubbing and her gossiping neighbours and the Lane close by. Now what had she? Outside the ghetto she was strange, lonely. Barnett was rarely at home. After business hours he was busy with communal affairs. Committeeman here, treasurer there. Vice-President in this society, chairman of that organization. And now he was warden of the local synagogue, spent a deal of his time bossing the minister, Rev. Kishkenik, and rarely reached home till midnight. To-night was an exception, but he did not seem happy in his holiday.

Davy was pitifully distant from her. He had been nearer to her when he had tossed babbling on his bed of pain and madness. When she had tended him as an infant again. Dressed him and undressed him; washed him and fed him and wiped him. But now! This haggard, youthless youth with his furtive muttering and secret gesticulating was as near a stranger to her as child of her womb could be. What did God mean by bringing things to such a pass that the only outlet for the mother-love in her should be a shikseh? If only Leah the baby had lived, she might have had nachas in HER! This Gentile female, with all her lovable ways, at best was but a poor makeshift for a real Yiddish daughter-in-law. She watched her husband from time to time cast an angry look at the empty chair opposite him. Davy’s chair.

No, Barnett was not happy in his holiday from communal work. He fidgeted. The evening papers had told them almost nothing. Speeches. But not what Davy himself had said. Responded! What for a word was that to describe all his Davy must have said? His Davy was a speaker. A brilliant speaker. Everybody knew that. Hadn’t he spoken to crowded Zionist meetings? Didn’t everybody cheer him—ha? Responded! What for a word was that? In truth, he was uneasy. Nora had tried to assure him. Had told him that she had seen Davy at the Master’s but only for a second. Had not spoken to him. What for a way was that for a girl to talk of her choson? Not spoken to him! Only for a second! What was the world coming to—ha? And he fidgeted and glared angrily at the vacant place. Nora, too, fidgeted. She guessed the mixed feelings behind Mum’s glances. She intercepted Barnett’s angry glarings at the place where Davy should have been sitting. She stifled the strong desire in her to open their eyes. To tell them that David belonged neither to them nor to her but to that old fanatic of a Moses who was snatching him from all three of them and offering him up on the altar of his idol. A vague abstraction that he worshipped under the name of Israel. She wanted to scream out the revelation that she had gotten. That the very children in the School for Hebrew were being fed and fattened with delirious fantasies into fit soul-fodder for this hungry, abstract idol, Israel. But she pressed her hand to her heart and was silent and pretended to eat.

The taxi stopped. Darrel paid the fare. Davy quietly let himself and his new found friend in with his latch-key. Drew him into the smoking-room, relieved him of his hat and coat, made him comfortable in front of an electric radiator and set himself, with the new cunning that had crept into him to draw from the priest more information about this absolution business. He laughed inside himself. He was quite ready to be convinced. Quite prepared to subscribe to anything and everything. Jesus Christ the Jew, Virgin Mary the Jewess—SHE wasn’t a shikseh, anyway! Willing to subscribe to the Devil himself if only he could be assured of the difficult matter of abso—abso—absolution. But of course he had to be abso—abso—absobloominlutely assured. Of course. Davy was as ready to cheat this—this uncle of Nora as he would cheerfully cheat God Himself in order to win this abso—abso—absobloominlutely necessary abso—abso—absolution!

And the priest, His Eminence the new English Cardinal Darrel, with all his wisdom and psychological experience, guessed nothing of the lunatic chuckle in the lad’s heart as he proved to him the verity of the gospels.

Sarah left the table to give instructions in the kitchen to keep Davy’s supper warm for him. As she returned, she noticed the lights in the smoking-room and heard the voices of her son and another. Her pleasure at her son’s return was mingled with a vague idea that that other voice was not altogether strange to her. She had heard it before. But where or when she could not clearly tell. And the vagueness of her recollection disturbed her and added a new uneasiness to her little bundle of worries.

Followed by the maid with the coffee, she returned to the supper table. Since Davy’s return they had made a kind of general room of their drawing-room. The dining table that they had brought in for the better accommodation of those of their friends who came that sad morning months ago to form the necessary quorum for that unnecessary mourning service, they had retained. Into that room Davy had been brought back. Laid upon that chesterfield. The room, since that day of their futile mourning and miraculous relief, held in it something of Davy, of the old Davy. Was as if haunted by David’s old young self. There seemed more of the real Davy in that room than in the present Davy himself. And more and more they lived in the drawing-room. Especially in the evenings and on the Sabbath.

In the corner by the bay they had placed a revolving bookcase by Weeping and Willow’s and filled it with Davy’s school-prizes. All the poets, the classic novelists, Latin-books and Greek-books. And a great, black-and-gold Hebrew-and-English Old Testament he had won for Hebrew in the Jews’ Free School. Sometimes Sarah would allow Nora to dust them as a great privilege, but none else. There was something comforting in the look of that big black-and-gold Holy Book as it offered its glimmer to Sarah, returning from the kitchen and followed by the maid with the coffee.

Sarah had not yet learned to keep herself out of the kitchen and her hands from the utensils. She now had three maids, and a charing woman to help them all out. But they were no source of happiness to her. For one thing, kitchening was hard to give up for a woman constituted like Sarah, daughter of Leah the Squint-eyed of Pamunitzé, on her be peace! For another she could not trust these Gentiles not to mix meat and milk things. And the way they did their cleaning! Ladies!

So she helped the maid to gather the used dishes on the tray, instructed her in an indignant whisper to use the dishcloth with the BLUE border for washing up, and sniffed as the girl tossed her head. Ladies!

The girl left the room and Sarah poured out the coffee.

2. CHECK!

Barnett raised his cup to his lips and replaced it untasted. He opened his mouth to speak and shut it again after utterance of a queer wordless animal noise. He half rose from his chair and sat down again. He slanted another and another angry glare at the vacant seat opposite him and then suddenly clenched his fist and thumped on the table. Nora’s nerves were on edge and she started back with a catch at her heart. Sarah scolded.

‘Barnett! Cannt you holld yourself in—no?’

‘Vhat am I’ demanded her husband relieved to be given opportunity for the venting of his irritation and grievance. ‘Vhat am I? An angel—ha? Look like vone, donnt I—ha? Und an angel vould holld himself in—ha? My sonn goes to get de Victoria Cross und vonnt let his fader-mudder go mit im und shake hands in de palace—IN DE PALACE!—mit de prince—de PRINCE—ha? Lorrds—generals—lorrd-mayorrs—gentlemen—all de ’igh—’igh! Und if his fader-mudder goes he says he vouldn’t take de cross—ha? Bloomin’ he called it! BLOOMIN’ CROSS!—ha? Und dat’s not vhat he really said. Onnly I’m too much of a proper Ainglishman to say again vhat he did say. Snottynose! Not take de cross—ha? Insolt de prince—ha? De PRINCE! Vhere is it to hear such a thing—ha? HA?’ And he accompanied the final ‘HA?’ with a doubled horse-power thump that went far to relieve his too-long pent up emotions. Nora tried in left-handed fashion to excuse the lad.

‘If the master hadn’t bullied poor Davy, he’d never have gone at all.’ And then she repented her words. It was unfair of her to hint wrong at the Master. Perhaps he was right to sacrifice David and herself to Israel. Perhaps Israel was worth the double burnt-offering. What did she know of the big things. Perhaps the Master was right. Perhaps her Cardinal-uncle was right. Perhaps they were both right. In such a big world there was, perhaps, room for many big things that she would never be able to grasp. Room perhaps for her uncle’s Christ and the Master’s Israel. And no room at all for Noras and Davids to live their own little lives. How was she to tell? Athwart her brooding Barnett, relieved of his temper, reached out for his cap-and-bells.

‘A Jew not take de Cross!’ he protested. ‘Meshuggé!’

‘Better meshuggé dan dead,’ commented his wife and then coupled together, impiously but gratefully, deity and the shikseh. ‘Tank God—und Norelé!’ Less rarely than of old she used the affectionate diminutive for this Gentile maid who had crept into their home and, with her wonderful nursing, saved—so said Dr. Rodman—their son’s life. And now what did anything matter excepting Davy? Everything he must have to get well. And if he could not get well without Nora, then Nora he must have. Nora, yes; but not a shikseh. No. Nora knew that. It was no longer a tacit secret. Barnett was to have mentioned the matter to the Rev. Kishkenik. There must be no fuss. She knew that of late the Chief Rabbi had been setting his face against marriage-converts. But this was different. Their Davy’s peace of mind was at stake. And then it wasn’t as though Nora was an ordinary shikseh. The other day she had let out secret that she could read Hebrew better than Sarah herself. Understood it in fact much better, for Sarah in Pamunitzé had learned as little Hebrew as Sarah in London had learned English. Sarah would never have thought of needling for a Hebrew-teacher old enough to be her grandfather. She turned to Barnett.

‘Vhen did de Minister say Nora should be ready?’

‘Minister!’ Barnett replied with the contempt of a real warden. ‘Minister! Vhen I say she’s ready den she’s ready. Vhat am I a varden for? Minister! Am I de Minister und is Mr. Kishkenik de varden I should go down on my hands und knees to ask a favour from him—ha? Minister! Und besides, from making so much love to de Master she’s becom’ such a Hebrew scholar dat she vould take a prize as a Rabbi’s vife never mind Davy’s—ha?’

They had not failed to note the strange fascination the Master had for Nora. They had often chaffed them both for flirting so openly. But Sarah, keener-minded than her husband, had also noticed the Master’s hardening of late. Somehow he had not been openly informed of their intentions regarding the yiddishing of the shikseh. Yet they knew he knew of it. And his rather grim silence was not satisfactory. The Barnetts and Sarahs of the world wriggle under grim silences. Differences should be cleared up by tiffs. Tongue-fights. But the Master was not like them. He showed his displeasure by withholding himself from NORMANDY, and by hardening his heart against the shikseh’s overtures. He hated to thrill to the touch of the Gentile finger that wore Davy’s betrothal ring. Yes, the thing had got so far as that. One day, when the sun had shone with an unusually genial glow, David had seemed his old gay self. He had laughed and joked and teased and made them all happy. And in front of his father and mother he had taken the girl and kissed her and given her a gold ring with a cheap blue stone to match her strangely, strangely blue eyes, and made his father and mother toast the occasion with whisky and the cry of Mazeltov! (good luck).

And his parents had feared to disturb his sudden sanity with any demur, and the next day it was Barnett decided to buy a Hebrew primer and leave it on the girl’s dressing table; and Sarah began to teach her little hidden things, meet only for a Jewish bride. Laws of conjugal hygiene imparted intentionally in casual asides that caused the girl to blush hotly over her olive cheeks and shyly hide her strangely blue eyes behind flaxen lashes.

For two days the sun shone, and then the clouds came back. Davy relapsed. The Master, sensing a new situation, had changed, hardened, had become greyer, grimmer. Seemed as if he inwardly mocked their foolish plans for his leader-elect of all Israel.

‘You know vhat?’ Sarah permitted the uneasiness of them all to find words. ‘You know vhat, Barnett? I donnt tink de Master likes Nora so much since de engagement. He never been here since den. Und—’

But Barnett stirred in rebellion against this Hebrew-teacher and all his ways. His hold on his son had never altogether ceased to offend him. He contented himself with minimizing the present difficulty.

‘Nottink!’ he disposed of the Master and his power. ‘Vhat’s it got to do mit Mr. Moses—ha? My Davy, like Dr. Rodman says, must have everytink he vants. Und he vants Nora. Und dat settles de matter. Und Nora’ll make Davy a nice Yiddish vifelé, und Davy vill be proper better again with such a vonnderful ness always mit him—eh, yes, Norelé?’

But in the girl’s ears rang again the cold words of Moses: SHE IS NOT OF THE RACE. And she recalled the impulse that had prevented her from staying and comforting her poor, mad lover—and she was not at all as confident as Guardy pretended to be. She made a vague attempt at lessening Barnett’s confidence, at preparing him for some struggle she intuitively expected.

‘The Master is bent on Davy getting quickly better,’ she ventured. ‘In the speech I typed for him this evening, I noticed that his proposal to appoint Davy the Zionist delegate to the conference of the powers he’s always talking about has been accepted. I know he made Davy go to the Palace to-day with the idea of hastening on the crisis in his illness.’ She had gone as far as she dared and now paused.

‘Crisis-shmisis!’ mocked Barnett disparagingly. ‘Doesn’t everybody know vhat he did—ha? Vasn’t it in all de papers—ha?’ and he jumped out of his seat and ran behind the bay curtains and emerged with an armful of newspapers. ‘Here dey are! All of dem! Everyvone! Und more upstairs! Yiddish und Ainglish! Look! All of dem! Great hero! Great Jewish hero—ha? Oi! My Davy! My Dovid’ll! Killed six Gerrmans all by himself! My Dovid’ll!’ and the proper Ainglishman lifted his countenance to the electric light and closed his eyes in ecstatic beatitude.

Sarah did not share her Barnett’s patriotism. In truth the knowledge that her Davy had murdered six men was no happiness to her. She did not recognize her son in the murderer. She understood better his madness, more appropriate for the dreadful deed. She had long ago decided that it had not been her Davy that had done the killing. It had been some dibbuk. Some devil-soul that had crept into her son, and that had not yet been exorcised. She had one day made a special journey to the East End to Reb Zalman. But Reb Zalman had not thought it necessary to go to extremes. He did not actually deny the possibility of a devil-soul in the lad. But he had bidden her be patient. And he had smiled. And it was the memory of that smile that prevented her from feeling the full horror of Nora’s next words.

‘It seems,’ she again gave way to the imperious necessity of preparing the old people. ‘It seems that the last of the Germans that were killed in that charge by Davy was also a Jew.’

Sarah took fast hold of the memory of Reb Zalman’s smile and did not faint. Instead she cried quietly, evenly. Now they knew the worst. So that was it. That was why the boy had taken refuge in madness. So that was it—that was it—that—that was it!

Barnett’s ecstasy of patriotic-cum-paternal pride left him, and the papers fell from his arms. What was this? What did this shikseh say about their Davy? He stared at her pallid olive face and strangely blue eyes. What did she say about their Davy? Suddenly he realized, and weighed in his mind which was the better of two things to do. Should he fall down into his chair and bury his head on the table and cry—or should he pretend he was not a heart-broken Jewish tailor whom God was having a game with, but a sensible fellow who was not to be bowled over by what after all was merely an accident. He at last decided on the latter course. He stooped down, sighed at his bulk that made stooping rather difficult, and rose again with the papers in his arms. He disappeared behind the bay curtains and re-emerged, empty-armed.

‘Vhat’s dat got to do mit it—ha? Beforr my Davy goes to kill a Gerrman, should he ask him to show his tzitzis—or vhat—ha?’

(The tzitzith or miniature edition of the tallith with the ritual fringes is an under garment worn ever since the larger symbol began to be provocative of danger in the Jew’s career in the world.)

‘Vhat I vant to know is vhy he isn’t at home now—ha?’ he continued. ‘Not had to eat a whole day, I ’xpect—ha? Good for him—ha? Get fat on not eating—ha? Vhy you not brought him home—ha? Vhat for you left him—ha?’

But this was something that Nora could not explain. It had been a sudden impulse, following the cold revelation by Moses of all she had intuitively sensed long ago. She stared away from Barnett as if she would appeal to the common womanhood in Sarah for assistance.

‘Davy’s in de—de smoking-room,’ she volunteered. ‘I just herrd him talkin’ mit a man vhen I came back from de kitchen—no?’ And then she added. ‘Funny ting. De odder man’s speaking reminded me of—of sommtink. I just cannt remember vhat!’

Barnett’s brow cleared. A sly look came into his eyes. He tapped his pocket, from which an envelope peeped out, and threw a quizzing look at Nora. Then he seated himself again and considered his womenfolk and laughed.

‘Vhat a life!’ he reached out for his cap-and-bells. ‘Vhat a life! Smoking-room, dining-room, breakfast-room, drawing-room—you know vhat, Sarah? I dropped a bit tzigarette-ash in de lobby—no, de hall! ’xcuse me—und de ferrst or de second-hand maid, she looked on me like a dead enemy!’

‘Vhat you tink?’ indifferently sparred his spouse ‘She vants to be a slave like I vas—de vay de hands used to vipe deir feet on my kitchen—ha—no?’

Nora felt that it was her turn to speak. Always when the heads of the Cohen ménage sparred she had been wont to side-track the subject under discussion by a remark that had nothing to do with anything. Custom is powerful, and Nora bowed to it unknowingly when she spoke. Not that she knew precisely what she would say, but she opened her mouth and said something—whatever was on the tip of her tongue.

‘I feel so restless,’ she heard herself say, ‘as though some—something strange was about to—to——’

Sarah leaned over to the girl with an anxious query.

‘Nu, vhat? You been to de master to-day—no? Nu? Spoke all right mit you—ha? friendly—no?’

Nora sat up stiffly as she replied.

‘It’s that Zionism, Mums. I know. I type his speeches. Likes me—yes. We’ve—somehow—always been sort of drawn to—O, what’s the good? Davy’s to be the great Jewish leader—pure—spotless—you know the master’s power over him—you saw this morning—He can make Davy do—O yes, I can see him letting Davy—I nursed him back to—O! it’s Davy! Davy! Davy! Not me! Not my loving him!—I know—I know—I’m only a shikseh after all. I—O!’

And the jerking outburst had its peroration in the orator crumpling up on the table and giving way to a fit of wild sobbing such as Davy’s death-news had not been able to wring from her. Sarah wiped her own eyes and sighed and reached out her hand slowly and touched the girl’s quivering shoulders. Barnett regarded his womenfolk ironically.

‘Anodder in de famly—ha?’ he touched his forehead. ‘I vould like Sarah to tell me onnly vone ting. Who’s Davy’s fader—ha? De master or ME—Ha? HA?’

And so gave Nora time to recover herself.

‘Don’t mind me,’ she wiped her eyes. ‘I suppose I’m overstrung with stopping up and with worrying. It’s quite true I feel restless all over—as though something strange was about to—as though I’m about to have a crisis in place of Davy. And last night, I—I slept badly—I had a funny dream—that I was being torn between mountains with rocky faces—and one like——’

‘Nora!’ shook the cap-and-belled Barnett his forefinger at her. ‘Nora—de chipotaytess—ha? Too late didn’t I tolld you—ha? Vhat kind of a lady eats up tree-four-fife plates of chipotaytess ten o’clock at night—ha?’

Vile slander, of course, and Sarah protected the maid.

‘Aie, stop you jokes! I haf a feeling also, like Nora. Vhen I tink of de voice of de man I herrd talking mit Davy just beforr, I——’

‘Yes,’ calmly interrupted her husband. ‘I also can be a prophet. Und a better prophet dan bot’ of you. YOU, Nora, got a dream—und you, Sarah, my life, got a feeling—und me, I got a letter!’ and he patted the envelope projecting from his pocket.

From the smoking-room penetrated the murmur of voices. Nora recognized Davy’s hoarse, eager croak. But it was the other voice that disturbed her. It was familiar yet unknown. Its grave, quiet assurance penetrated through the intervening wall and seemed to advance until it rested quite inside her. She felt it strange that neither Barnett nor Sarah heard the murmuring in the other room. But they were sparring again.

‘Vhat?’ questioned Sarah her spouse’s cocksureness.

‘A letter!’ repeated Barnett importantly and withdrew the envelope and flaunted it.

Nora stirred restlessly under the combined onslaught of that stranger-familiar voice and the distractingly incongruous bickering to which it formed an uneasy accompaniment.

‘Oi, you letterrs!’ played back Sarah. ‘You letterrs! Remember de letter dat time vhen Nora, she ferrst came to us?’ The tugging inside the girl, just where in hospital she had learned one’s heart was, was becoming insistent. Nora determined to ignore it. She studied the sniff with which Sarah accompanied her jibe. Always Sarah sniffed at any reminder of her neglected night-school opportunities. The letter was such a reminder. Barnett had long ago given up chaffing his wife on that matter. Since Davy’s entry into the war, he had even given up proclaiming his claims to Englishry. But Sarah, truly feminine, had never forgotten or—speaking in Cohenese—ever forgiven her husband’s one-time bombastic assumption of superiority over her relative ignorance. But Barnett smiled indulgently.

‘You not forgot it yet?’ he marvelled. ‘Let me see,’ he calculated as he fanned himself with the envelope. ‘Terrteen yerrs ago—ha? Vonnderful! Vell, my life, dis letter is from de same vone as dat vone!’ and he put the letter back into his pocket.

Nora felt time hurrying by with nightmarish urgency. It did not go on. It went round and round. Breathlessly. Unceasingly. Beginning from the moment when, a little child in white woollies, she had been left on the Cohens’ door-step, in Davy’s reluctant arms. And then she was thrust into the Cohen’s kitchen and was addressing a Mr. Moses and saying:

‘Are you Mr. Cohen?’

But Time, in impatient hurry to go round, go round, flashed through the convent, through the Commercial College, through Davy’s teasing and love-making, through the office in Whitechapel, the hospital, her lover’s death and resurrection, his sick bed, Moses’ School for Hebrew and—and back again in lightning circulation to the Cohen’s kitchen and her babyishly wistful query:

‘Are you Mr. Cohen?’

Why didn’t Time go on? Just beyond the circle was something it was absolutely necessary for her mind to reach. And Time would insist on going round, going round. At last Time did make a forward stride.

‘Oi!’ said Sarah. ‘You mean Nora’s—er—guardian?’ and then added: ‘I see . . . I know now. He’s dere in de smoking-room mit—mit——’

‘P’raps,’ opined Barnett. ‘Vhy not—ha? Yes—ha?’

Nora felt that Time had gone forward with a vengeance. She rose from the table, passed round to kiss Sarah and slipped away from sight behind the bay curtains. The other two were too intent to notice where she had gone. They sensed her absence and spoke more freely. All things now centred round their boy. Round their boy’s health. And this event, too.

‘P’raps he’ll cheer Davy up a bit—no?’ suggested Sarah.

‘God forbid!’ cried the warden of the synagogue. He all of a sudden recollected an incident thirteen years ago. A challenge thrown by the Master and picked up by the priest.

‘Meshuggé?’ queried Sarah his sanity. ‘Donnt you vant Davy should be——’

‘Baptized—ha?’ concluded Barnett for her violently. ‘No!’

‘Two in de famly?’ persisted Sarah.

‘Sarah,’ explained Barnett ignoring the insult. ‘I not got a memry—ha? Dat time, before he left, dat priest—he——’

‘Gorn!’ scorned Sarah. ‘Davy had a too good Hebrew-master for dat!’

‘Hebrew-master!’ scoffed Barnett bitterly. ‘You know vhat? I remember just like it vas to-day—how Mr. Moses—yes—ASKED de priest to try und have a go at making Davy a meshummed (apostate)—ha? Vhat you say to dat—ha?’

At the back of her mind Sarah had also a hazy recollection of some such thing. And in her complex rose to the surface all the antagonism latent against this Mr. Moses. She now for the first time expressed in actual accusation this antagonism. Crudely. Illogically. But for the moment sincere. She was a woman and entitled to make a sudden wrong-about-turn in her mental manœuvres.

‘Barnett,’ she whispered as though afraid lest her words reach the ears of the absent accused. ‘You know vhat I been tinking? Dis Mr. Moses is de beginning of all our trobbles. It vas him made Davy go to de var und get wounded und crippled und mad, und now pushes Nora avay from marrying him und making him better und vants him to be a Zionist leader all togedder with a meshummed goy—Oi! my head’s going round!’

‘Donnt be so qvick,’ reproved Barnett. ‘I remember dat time dat de master said he vould try de odder vay. He said to dat priest he said dat he himself vouldn’t mind de odder vay putting a hand in it——’

‘You ask me!’ reached out Sarah a recollection to justify herself. Something the writer never knew until she mentioned it. ‘You ask me und I vill tell you dat de master never puts a hand—he alvays puts a foot in it—no? Remember dat box of eggs—no?’

And at that precise moment Davy ran in from the adjoining smoking-room and shuffled unseeingly to the corner where stood the bookcase glimmering with the prizes he had won in his boyhood.

His parents dropped Moses for the time being out of their lives. Their hearts ached to note Davy’s furtive, trembling excitement. Was that the gay, careless, laughing, brilliant son they had known a year ago? Their eyes were sore after him. He searched among his prizes. Fumbled the books as if but half-seeing. Chanced on the big black-and-gold Old Testament in Hebrew and English and drew it out and held it in his hand. The other sleeve flapped emptily. He turned, still with no glance at his parents. Was about to leave the room when his father called out to him in a voice whose anger served to conceal a pain almost too indecent for exposure.

‘Vhere you running to, Davy—ha? Cannt spare a minute for fader-mudder—ha? Vhat fader-mudder—vhen fader-mudder—ha? HA?’

The eager cunning fell away from the youthful, haunted face and left it blank. The young twisted mouth opened to speak and remained open. It was fearful to watch the frown wherewith the lad attempted to chase away the vacancy in his mind. The frown itself surrendered to a look of scared idiocy. His lower jaw fell away, hung strainless.

‘Vhat’s de matter, Dovid’ll mein kind?’ It was his mother speaking. O he knew that! and a smile of satisfaction at realizing that the vacancy in his mind was not going to have all its own way encouraged the mother. She came close to him as he stood there, the heavy book in his hand and that glimmer of a sane smile on his face. She petted him, and he submitted passively. Her plump hands were cool on his cheeks. Their stroking seemed to smooth out something. They fumbled upwards to his eyes. Massaged the ache out of the bony sockets. Eased his tight forehead. O! it was so nice he could cry.

And he might have cried but that behind the eased forehead burnt in sudden smart his mother’s sharp questioning.

‘Vhat’s dat man been saying to you—ha?’

Yes, he must answer. Must answer something. But he knew that the words on the tip of his tongue were somehow not right. But what could he do? He had no other words. His mother wanted him to speak—to say something. And he had no other words. No other words. No other words. And he must blurt them out. Odd words. Broken sentences. But first a frightened glance round. It was all right. The master was not here.

‘We—we’re discussing the—the Bible—the—the New— He—he’s kind—knows— Told me Nora’s his—his—I told him—told him—told him—and he—says—he says—only if I become—if I believe in—in—in——’

Barnett shrank away from his son as from a man sick with an unclean disease. Then found the table under his hand and clenched his fist and banged and smote the cloth-covered oak until it seemed as if his life-strength would depart with the violence of his banging. The coffee-cups fell to the floor and rolled whitely on the carpet and still Barnett banged and smote while Davy stared with open mouth, and Sarah cracked her fingers in mute agony, and the bay curtains shook as if held by a trembling hand. At last Barnett ceased his banging and his smiting. Breathed hard. Then:

‘Vhat!’ he panted, thrust the mother aside and glared at the fatuous face of his son. ‘Vhat!’ he shouted. ‘Vhat nonsense is dis—ha? Lost no time, de priest—ha? HA?’

The maid opened the door and admitted Moses. If she uttered his name, none heard her in that room. The door shut after her. Moses stood quite still, watched, waited for his cue.

Now David crumpled away from his father’s rage; whined:

‘Don’t! Don’t! Dad, don’t shout at me. See. I can’t sleep. Can’t sleep. Go to bed. Listen—listen—see—see—all the time—all the night—listen—see—and he—’ with a back jerk of his head to the smoking-room ‘—he says—says if—if—won’t let Nora—won’t let Nora—won’t let Nora—’ The Bible dropped from his fingers with a crash and he clutched his head and screamed—‘God! God! If I can’t have Nora help me—God! don’t let me always see—hear— MAKE ME BLIND—DEAF—O GOD!—O GOD! O GOD!’ suddenly his voice concentrated itself into an intense whisper. ‘No! God can’t do anything. Can’t do anything. Even when I shut my eyes tight—tight—I can still see—SEE! And when Nora’s not there—and everything’s quiet—quiet—then—then—then—’

More and more violent and incoherent grew his mumbling. Suddenly his eyes fell on Moses in front of the door and he stretched out his hand to him and cried:

‘BLOOD! MASTER, BLOOD!’ then rubbed his fingers violently against his coat, regarded them curiously and shrank away from them till he crouched by the bay hangings and croaked:

‘Forgive me—forgive me—forgive—for—’

And after a moment’s silence the crouching boy stared down on the floor as at something he saw, and worked his hand as if he were trying to pull out a weapon from soft flesh. He turned an appealing look to the others and asked them as if in sudden sanity:

‘Can’t you hear him? He’s crying sh’ma Yisroel—sh’ma Yisroel! Listen, listen.’

The horror laid its heavy hand on Barnett and Sarah. Moses spoke, and his voice was chilling, inexorable, astringent.

‘Tell me, Davy, how much more melodramatically tragic is the killing of Jew by Jew than the killing of man by man?’

Under the sting of the lash behind Moses’ words, under the sheer astringence of his sarcasm, Davy regained a crooked hold on himself. He felt offended at the mocker of his pain. Would he deprive him of the one luxury remaining to him—that of surrendering to this lust for recollection? That deprived of, what was there left to him but the blankness against which even surrender to recollection-lust was some sort of shield. He must do battle for his shield. He must get up, stand up, face this Master, expostulate with him. What did he want? Ah, that was what he must say to him. What did he want with him—eh? He rehearsed the words carefully and got up, stood up, faced the Master, expostulated with him, spluttered at him:

‘What d’you want of me?’

‘Dear me!’ the Master smilingly greeted his first success. ‘Why should we be different from other people? Why shouldn’t we enjoy the same privilege of killing each other that Christians enjoy?’

‘What d’you want of me? WHAT D’YOU WANT OF ME?’ cried out Davy against the Master. These words were the only ones he was yet sure of, and he had to use them over and over.

‘This lunacy IS a nuisance,’ smilingly protested Moses. Suddenly he changed his tactics. The figure before him was swaying. ‘David Cohen!’ he called out in his pedant voice. ‘David Cohen, mad or sane, Jew or meshummed! hear the words of Reb Zalman, the message he gave to me for you. “I cannot prepare to depart,” said Reb Zalman, “until the soul of David Cohen is at rest.” ’

Barnett and Sarah stared from one to the other with vague incomprehension. David stopped swaying. There was a struggle within him. He stared hard at Moses as if he would tear some meaning out of him. Across his memory flitted his dreams of the past. The crowding round him of those heroes of deathless fame; the lion and bear he had slain to protect his flocks; the victory of his early days over the Philistinian giant; the golden laver under his fingers; the blessing of his people; the adventure at the river’s bank; his wrestling; his holding of his foe. Dreams—dreams. He awoke; passed his hand over his eyes; glared round him like a trapped animal; snatched at a cap lying on the bookcase; kicked the Bible out of his road, and made for the door just as it opened and framed the figure of Cardinal Ignatius Darrel. With a muttered curse Davy rushed to the bay curtains and dragged them apart and revealed the half-fainting girl of his desire. He fell back, glared; with a husky cry flung himself past the priest and out of the street door that crashed upon his exit.

3. CHEQUE!

In the smoking-room the priest had waited. He heard voices—among them imagined he caught the sound of a voice he tingled to hear. But it was not clear. He could not make out what it said. It was not happy sounding. And then David left him to fetch a Bible. The boy was so sincere in his desperate longing to be convinced of the reality of the gift of Christ. Came through the boy’s voice, tortured, agonized. The pity of it increased upon the priest. He prayed to Jesus for assistance in winning this poor distracted, persecuted soul to God and Christ and peace. Persecuted. For with the boy’s screams was mingled another’s cold, heartless jeering. And then he could no longer contain himself. His Master commanded him to go forth. He obeyed—opened the door in the chamber of strife to intrude to the lad’s relief. The lad himself brushed past him like a hunted animal and fled into the lampless dark of the road. And at the other end of the room, framed by the bay hangings, stood—but no! he would not look; not until he could look at her with none by. He would not look. Soon—very soon he would find out—all. The colour of her hair, her eyes, the shape of her chin—all. Meanwhile the glorious inward delight of anticipation.

‘Good evening,’ said Darrel, softly shutting the door behind him. Barnett turned round and regarded him. The priest had altered very little in spite of years of spiritual labours and austerities of bloody whip and shirt of hair. His hair, it was true, was tinged with the tawny grey to which light-coloured head-tops had to submit. And the mouth was even gentler than of old, kinder, and surrounded by the same faint mesh-work that shaded the blue eyes.

‘Good evening,’ repeated Darrel, and tactfully covered the answering silence with a few polite words of explanation. ‘I met your gallant son quite by accident,’ he ventured. The silence resumed its sway for a full minute. Then Barnett took out the envelope, drew out the letter and donned his glasses previous to an ostentatious examination of heading and signature.

‘Ye-es, Mr. CARRDINAL Darrel,’ he began. ‘I got it orright, onnly a bit late. I donnt live anymore near de Lane, you see. Plenty monney. Business orright. Everybody pays up. Ye-es. You also orright now—ha? A great man—ha? A carrdinal—no—ha? Und—und you owe me for your—er—’ he took out a pocket-book that had been bought thirteen years ago and labelled Nora Darrel—‘for OUR Nora’s Catolic education und business training—No! De business training dat’s my benefit. But I donnt see vhy a Jew, dese days, should finance de Pope—ha? Vell, vhere vas I? O, yes. Our Nora’s Catolic education—er—tree yerrs at de convent at vone fifty—four-fifty; mit convent expenses, forrty-eight-nine-und-eight; und outside expenses—er—vone penny—altogedder four-ninety-eight-nine-und-ninepence, tank you.’

With a genial smile Barnett laid the open pocket-book down on the table and beside it a fountain pen.

‘Too little, I am sure,’ responded Darrel with a grave bow. ‘Let us, if you do not mind, leave business for another time. I intend taking a house in London.’ He bowed again; this time to Sarah. ‘How are you, Mrs. Cohen? The little one I saw in the cradle some dozen years ago or more must be quite a great girl! Ah, this war!’ he sighed. ‘Your gallant son—poor boy—I do want you to——’

Sarah passed him heavily by and at the door interrupted him with a depressed hate in her voice.

‘Vhat you vant? I should jump? dance? I vonce had two children und now—now—I donnt know if I haf vone!’ and she entered into the kitchen from which the maids had retired, and sat there on a hard chair in front of the fire, and stared and stared while from her eyes the tears rolled one after the other, one after the other.

‘Oi, Mr. Carrdinal!’ laughed Barnett with a chuckle of hate in his fat throat. ‘Donnt mind my vife—ha? She’s onnly a voman! Fancy! My Sarah tinks you came over—de ’Tlantic, vas it?—specially to convent her Davy—ha? Ain’t it a joke—ha? Ha—ha—have a cup off coffee—no—ha?’ He turned to Nora and noticed at the same time that Moses had picked up the Bible and was replacing it.

‘Nora,’ Barnett imitated the bow of the other as well as he could, ‘you must know dis is your—er—guardian-uncle, Nora. A big Catolic priest. Onnly you must not call him just Guardy like you call me; not even uncle; onnly Fader. Like de Reverend Douglas, you know—Fader. It’s because a priest mustn’t haf a child off his own to call him Fader. Dat’s vhy you must call him Fader. Am I right?’ He turned innocently to the other for confirmation.

Darrel drew upon all his large stock of Christian charity and passivity, and prevented the old Adam in him from avenging the taunts of the Jew. Nevertheless his Christianity only just sufficed him, and the old Adam strained at the leash.

‘Mr. Cohen,’ he asked gently, ‘would you mind doing me a great favour by permitting me a few moments’ private conversation with my ward and niece?’

‘Not at all,’ beamed Barnett. ‘Not at all. Cerrtainly, Mr. CARRDINAL. Und vould you mind doing me a great favour by settling dis little bill of arrears—ha? I donnt reckon her clo’s; for vhy? Because she paid dat off herrself—sixpence a veek.’

‘Since you insist, Mr. Cohen, I should like to repeat what my letter will have already told you. The failure of Barrow’s——’

‘I tolld you beforr you vent avay dat de bank vas no good—didn’t I tolld you? Never mind, de cheque you’ll make out now vill be cashed ferrst ting in de monning. Vonce upon a time you might have had two-und-a-half pretzent discount. Onnly you cannt get discount now—for vhy? Because you two-und-a-half long over-Jew—ha?’

‘Mr. Cohen,’ quietly urged Darrel, eager for his child, ‘surely my credit——’

‘Not so good as your cash, Mr. Carrdinal. You know vhat de philosopherrs donnt say—ha? “In de midst of life ve are in debt.” But dat donnt mean to say dat you should be in debt in de midst of my life—ha? Gorn!’ and he directed Darrel’s attention once more to the fountain pen on the table.

Darrel was eager for his child. He proved disappointing meat for Barnett’s hate. Certainly the Jew had done his damnedest to concentrate his blows upon what should have been the priest’s most vulnerable spot. But the man was girded with Christian patience as with a coat of mail. He took the blows with bowed head nor flinched. He was eager for his child. Later he would see that this Cohen was properly remunerated. At present let it be as he wished. He took out his chequebook, approached the table, used Barnett’s pen, and still managed to smile a gentle smile as he pitied the Jew and his unChristian mockery.

Barnett closely examined the cheque and found therein an opening for a shrewd, subtle little blow. He jingled some coppers, withdrew his hand from his pocket, thrust some pennies into Darrel’s palm and said:

‘Onnly donnt be too good, Mr. Carrdinal. Nine-und nine, not ten, tank you.’

Darrel bowed his head, still smiled and pocketed the subtle little insult. At this Barnett thought of resigning.

‘Und now, Master’—he called Mr. Moses.

Moses turned round to meet Darrel’s surprised look. In the eyes of the priest he realized the change that had come over himself in the last thirteen years. Realized it as he never otherwise could have done. There was a shocked look in the eyes that regarded him again after thirteen years. So it was not merely a sad fancy that he was fast becoming an old man, senile, decrepit. It was written on his face for all the world to read. So—he was old; old like Reb Zalman who could not prepare to depart until Davy’s soul was at rest. Moses smiled to himself. He had not been able to see the Rabbi that evening at all. It had been a chance thought with which he had thought to play on the lad. A lie—but was it? Why did that thought come into his mind at that moment? Did Reb Zalman, after all, send it? If Reb Zalman was of the——

Darrel recognized in the old man before him the person he had passed in the East End on leaving the convent. The faint resemblance to the Moses he had once met—once only—had caused him to halt. But he had convinced himself that the resemblance was too faint to be more than accidental. The Moses he had met that memorable once could not in the short space of a dozen years have changed into this half-doddering old man. No, he had been mistaken. And now was this same old man looking into his eyes and reading therein his rude amazement and discourteous sympathy. Darrel extended his hand as to an unfortunate equal, nor could he restrain himself from saying:

‘My dear Mr. Moses, I would hardly have——’

The other winced as he touched the extended hand.

‘No,’ he sighed, ‘—but you, Cardinal?’

The priest was not afraid to look the Master straight in the face. An hour ago had not Heaven sent him sign of grace? He replied to the other’s slight stressing of his high dignity with the gentle, assured, nothing-fearing mien of one at perfect peace with the God he worshipped.

‘I have toiled in my Master’s fields and, with the help of the Lord Jesus Christ,’ the tall figure bowed and crossed itself at the simple sound of the holy name—‘I have lived to see the fruit of my sowing.’

Moses laughed within himself at the worse than futile auto-hypnotism of priest and missionary. Here were the Christian nations of the world, with bloody fangs bared, biting and tearing each other’s throat—and this priest really imagined he was cultivating the fields of God when he made Christians of savages——when he converted them from sin to gin. The jibe of the East End scribe occurred to him:

His inner laughter left him and he turned angrily on the complacency of the priest, ignorant of the filthy hair-shirt and scourge-scars under the immaculate linen.

‘Y-yes, yes,’ he stammered ‘—and this most Christian war—m-manure provider for those fields of y-your—’

But here Barnett came to the priest’s assistance.

‘Oi, Master,’ he pleaded, the cheque in his fingers, ‘for Christ’s sake donnt sta’t agricultural arguments!—Mr. Carrdinal,’ deliberately in the priest’s face Barnett tore the cheque in his fingers to tiny bits and let them flutter to the carpet, ‘vhen you und your—er—your—er—und Nora haf findished mit vone anodder, you’ll find de Master in de smoking-room—no—breakfast-room—dining-room—librerry—any bleddy room you like, onnly let’s get out of dis room, Mr. Moses, qvick—or I vonnt be able to holld myself in anodder second!’ And he held the door open until the Master, after a grim smile at the priest’s wincing at the vulgar misuse of a good old English Catholic oath, and another smile even grimmer at Nora’s unwinking regard of her—her guardian, preceded him out of the room. The door shut.

4. CHEATED OF CHRIST

Nora took a slow step towards Darrel. Somewhere in her brain sounded the thinly veiled jibes of Barnett. Somewhere in her heart words pulsed, clamoured. She was not a fool. She had nursed men. She recalled the night before Davy’s leave for France. She was not a fool. O no! She took another slow step forward. And now her—her uncle’s eyes met hers, wandered questingly over body, limb and feature. Took in with hungry greed the colour of her hair, eyes, the shape of her chin; rested with wondering surprise at the maturity of her. And now their glances met, slid sliding and slanting apart and met again. Nora pressed her hand tight, tight, to still the foolish pulse and clamour of those words at her heart. Suddenly the priest threw his arms out in uncontrollable gesture.

‘Nora!’ he cried, and drew the halting girl nearer, nearer, inch by inch. Strange to himself his voice, as strange as to his nightly mirage this woman creeping slowly towards him, inch by inch, nearer, nearer.

‘Nora! At last—at last—thirteen years, long, lonely—and now helpless—not knowing what to say. A child—with pretty little ways—and you come—now—a woman—sad—with a strange look—silent—’

Nora halted in her slow advance. Dug her fingers into her side to repress the clamour at her heart. Suddenly she knew what the pulsing of her blood said. It prompted, spoke, repeated and reiterated a question, a demand. Her blood beat out the rhythm of three words. Three words. By the pounding of her blood driven out from their lurking place under her heart up into her breast. Her breast’s heaving drove them into her throat. Her throat’s choking thrust them cowering behind her lips. And there they crouched until her lips could contain them no longer but spat them out upon the man before her:

‘Who are you?’

The demand beat against the priest and made him stagger. Beat like bars of iron upon his outstretched arms. Beat them down. The priest was suddenly afraid—like a wrecked non-swimmer who feels his life-belt slipping from him. Jesus Christ was turning away from him. He caught at a straw. At his own mortal humanity. Prevaricated.

‘Your guardian, Nora. Your uncle,’ he replied as to a simple question. Since Christ could cheat, surely he himself might cheat. But more and more words were being driven from under Nora’s heart in mad stages to her lips.

‘Who are you?’ they leaped from her dry mouth. ‘They avoid mentioning your name. When they must they falter as if an uncomfortable lie were on their lips. How come I to your name? Who are you?’ and more and more words hurried out from her and hurled themselves at the man. ‘They jib at your name as if you were a—a lie. Their Rabbi, Reb Zalman, looks into me as though I were a riddle he had long ago solved. Why did you leave me with these people? I have entered into their ways. I have grown to love them. Even the Master would love me if—if I were not a—a shikseh. Am I? Who am I? What am I? Who hung this cross about my neck when I was too little to know? I am no simple convent girl. Not now. I have nursed men. I have learned. WHO ARE YOU?’ And he:—

‘No, I am not your uncle. Only in so far as all men are brothers in Jesus Christ. I am not your uncle. I was—am—a lonely man. You were the child of one I loved.’ Steadily spoke the priest. Fought his child for his child.

‘What is it in your voice—in your eyes—in your face—that hurts—hurts—O! Who are you?’

Darrel raised his head.

‘I am the servant of the Lord Jesus. I do the work of Him Crucified. This cross’—and he took the symbol hanging from the fine chain round her neck in his hand—‘have I served all the years you have grown into womanhood. In desert and opium den, in market-place and battle-field have I preached this cross—and the Lord has led me through the dark places of the earth back to this house, to you—and David.’

‘David!’ cried Nora with the cold jeering of Moses in her ears. ‘David!’ she repeated the name lovingly, bitterly. ‘Will the master, think you, let David—his Davy—marry a shikseh?’

‘Would you marry a Jew?’ rejoined the priest sternly.

‘Did the Christian bomb avoid him because he was a Jew?’ demanded the girl, up in arms against the slight in the other’s voice more than against the reminder of the impossibility of her love. O she could kill herself for her prim prudery that night so long—so long ago! There would have been no room for these two to stand between them. A child might have crowded them out. Shame? In her agony her mouth twisted in bitter mock.

Darrel saw the twist of her mouth and set about to straighten it.

‘David has proven himself too noble to be left an outcast. We who have been blessed with truth must save him. Save him from eternal damnation. In the agony of his mind he is searching for the cleansing blood of the Lamb. Shall we not take him by the hand and lead him? Yours, Nora, the greater share in the glory of redemption. Comfort him. Comfort him in his sore distress. Ease him from his burden of sin and blood. Like a little child bring him into the fold.’

‘Would you have me,’ slowly spoke the girl. ‘Would you have me bring his mother’s grey hair in sorrow to the grave? Would you have me cause his father to mourn again—mourning without tears—without lamentation—like the Master’s cruel silence for his betrayed and treacherous Rachel?’ The man hardened. The girl spoke slowly on. ‘They have been kind to me. Shall I rob them of their only joy? Their only comfort? Leave them everlasting prey to hopeless shame—speechless grief?’

The priest guessed that Christ was either cheating him or merely impatient for his kin. If the latter, what had he to do with the sorrows of a Sarah, a Barnett, even a Moses? He took a step forward, once again held in his hand the sacred symbol suspended by the fine gold chain round her neck, and with the other hand half on high, spoke for HIS Master. Let this Hebrew-master learn once and for all who was the stronger. Old training bowed Nora’s head to the voice of the Church. Her hands folded themselves submissively, palmed.

‘As priest to the Lord Jesus Christ, God of us both—as your father and superior in the Holy Catholic Faith—by this sacred emblem of our Lord’s life and death and life—by this cross I hung round your neck when a little child—I COMMAND YOU!’

The girl started back from her momentary placidity as though struck by a brutal blow. The fine chain tore and left the little gold, inscribed cross—fatally inscribed cross—in her father’s hand. She knew now. Dully. Knew what she had always known, of course. Only she had not admitted the knowledge. Gradually her hands crept forward to form an uncertain shield between herself and her realization—between herself and her—her— Her blood pounded. Once more a scared question was being driven from heart to breast—to throat—to lips. She saw the man in front of her stare down at the inscription on the cross, still legible. Saw him frame words to explain. She tried to give him time, but those three words that formed the hunted question would not bide. Though she thrust them back under her heart, they would not lurk there comfortably. The pounding of her blood drove them out again into her breast. Her breast’s heaving drove them into her throat. Her throat’s choking thrust them cowering behind her lips. And there they crouched not long—until her lips would contain them no longer and spat them out upon her father and superior in the Holy Catholic Faith. They were too strong for her. They beat down her faltering arms, pressed her down to her knees, hurled themselves triumphant at their victim:

‘WHO ARE YOU?’

And their victim broke under the catastrophic onslaught. His pose was shattered. His mask was torn off. His frailty was exposed. Christ-rejected. The priest knew he had received a mortal wound. The priest died. In his place an elderly man beat his breast and groaned. He had been cheated of Christ. Cheated out of his youth, his manhood, his fatherhood. All his life a lie. Not his. A God-lie. Else had he not lost his child. An East End Rabbi’s smile would not have cheated him into giving his daughter into the hands of these Jews. She would never have met this lover of an accursed alien race. She would never have recoiled from him as she now recoiled. Never have hurt him as she hurt him now. She was moaning like a beaten dog. What was she whining? Something of mockery, shame. He raised his eyes from the cross’s simple, fatal inscription, ‘From your father,’ and he protested to Christ.

‘Thirteen years—thirteen years’ penance not enough—not enough? Dregs, too? The cup of bitterness—must I? Must I? From the hands of my own child—my own child?’ He spoke aloud. His child needed no additional words. She knew—and moaned like a beaten dog and whined words that writhed round ‘mockery’ and ‘shame’ till her father ceased beating his breast and reached out his hand to her, crouching. Reached out his hand without daring to touch her shivering body.

‘And I—’ he pleaded like an elderly man flirting with senility. ‘And I? Have I not suffered? All the years alone—alone! O my child—my child! Not knowingly did I sin against you—not against you—Nora! Nora, my child!’

But what heard the prostrate girl of her father’s abject pleading? He was but a putrefaction-stench on the bitter-sweet odours of her love. And she crouched and moaned:

‘How shall I come to Davy without a name? The Jews are so proud! How shall the new master of Israel marry a——’

But the bad word was prevented by the priest’s agonized:

‘Nora! Nora! No! No!’

Something in her obeyed him. She lay silent. Sensed his blind groping to the door. But she did not know that it was Barnett (who, from the other side, had perhaps been indelicately overhearing), who stood aside to let the poor priest pass into the smoking-room to be soothed by Moses. Nor did she see Barnett fill the doorway and regard her with pity. Nor did she see the bay curtains part and Davy, flushed and excited, shuffle in on tip-toe. Not until he bent over her and spoke was she aware of his presence.

5. REB ZALMAN SAYS: ‘SHALOM!’

The cool night air had vainly caressed the lad’s feverish eyes when he fled into the lampless street. He strode down the road. His thoughts whirled like fire-wheels. At the bend of the road a hundred yards down he almost threw down the bent figure of a very old man. The boy halted in his stride. Became suddenly confused. What was Reb Zalman doing in Kew Road? Another! Another to persecute him. No. He would cheat them all. A brilliant plan flashed in his mind. He turned right about as though he were a soldier again. Marched away from the Rabbi’s ‘shalom.’ Broke into a sprint. Leaped through the unlatched bay window. Pulled apart the curtains and, with necessary secrecy, tip-toed round the chesterfield to Nora, curiously crouching. He had no eyes for any but Nora. He bent over her. Wondered at her sobbing. Poor kid! Never mind. His plan was a brilliant one. Would save them. Save them both.

‘It’s all right,’ he soothed his girl. ‘It’s all right. All right! Don’t cry, Nora! Don’t cry. I’ve got a plan. A wonderful plan. A brilliant plan. We’ll cheat ’em. Cheat ’em. Get away—run away—at once—away—together—from England—from father, mother, Moses, Reb Zalman—everybody. Fool them. Fool ’em all. Forget—forget—together—cheat ’em—all—your—your guardian—abso—forget—Nora—quick—quick—at once——’

But the girl jerked her shoulder from his hand, swerved and ran till the chesterfield was between them both. Saw the sullen look upon Barnett in the doorway. Prepared to fly from the room.

David grew hysterical at the sober negation in her eyes.

‘Nora!’ he demanded angrily. ‘You too? All the world’s made a fool of me, and now—YOU? You make a fool of me! You make a fool of me! You? You?’ He swayed. The vacant look crept back into his eyes. His father saw it. Set to remove it in his own way. He walked slowly past the boy and girl. At the curtains he stopped. Turned heavily round and pretended he was the old Barnett, cap-and-belled.

‘ “You! You! You!” Vhat for a talk is dat from a choson—ha? Who else is making a fool off you—ha? Who else is marrying you—ha? All de volld—ha? Donnt every vife make a fool of her husband—ha? Vhat den does she marry him for—ha?’ Still speaking, Barnett entered the bay. ‘All de volld! How many vifes you vant, since you been to college, to make a fool of you—ha?’ He parted the curtains and, still talking and with his arms loaded with the newspapers, passed the two once more. ‘Vhat you tink—ha? You name is Solomon since you became a M.A.B.A.V.C.B. fool—ha? King Solomon didn’t go to Cambridge und vas a real clever man. King Solomon vas de cleverest man in de whole volld. IT TOOK A TOUSAND VIFES TO MAKE A FOOL OFF HIM. Vone’ll be plenty for you, Davy. ’Tzor-right. Plenty!’ And, hoping for the best, he left the two to themselves.

Nora felt herself weakening and fled through the bay out into the front lawn. The cool air eased the ache in her eyes but not the dull ache in her heart. Not, at least, until she encountered at the gates an old man, a very old man, who looked at her and smiled at her as though she were a puzzle he had long ago solved.

‘Shalom!’ said to her Reb Zalman as he held on to the gate and rested his bent back and feeble legs. Nora felt her heart soften as with a new humility. Felt herself chastised for presumption. Backed away from the old man. Crept round to the back of the house and stood there in the light of the kitchen window till the new humility in her grew to full power.

David, as he ran after her, found a difficulty in reopening the bay window. On the lawn she was not in sight. He ran to the gates and met the eyes of Reb Zalman who was resting from his walk before adventuring the path to the front door.

‘Shalom!’ said to him Reb Zalman. David relaxed. In him was born a new humility. He felt himself chastised for presumption. Backed away from the old, very old man. Backed away as if from some mystic future that beckoned him. Crept back to the shaded light of the drawing-room and stood there till the new humility in him grew to full power. The sudden greeting of the old Rabbi brought to his mind the legend of the thirty-six wondermen who never diminish in Jewry. Among them Rabbis, shoemakers, strong men, weak men, handsome and crippled. Among them Reb Zalman. Curious. Reb Zalman’s form was receding and another form was advancing. A form young, strong, but whose left sleeve flapped limply and emptily.

6. SWAN-SONGS—AND GENESIS AGAIN

The drawing-room was not empty long. As if driven by relentless urge to humble himself before his child, Darrel turned back from the Master. The master followed him, tried to stay the trembling fist that beat against the heaving breast. It was almost ludicrous to see the little Hebrew-teacher dragged protesting upon the tall cardinal’s strong, afflicting arm. And the cardinal’s lips were framing:

‘The wages of sin. The wages of sin.’ Over and over again. They were now in the drawing-room. Stood where Darrel and Nora had stood, where Nora and David had faced each other. And Darrel beat his breast and said over and over again:

‘The wages of sin. The wages of sin.’ Over and over again.

Moses was at a loss how to quieten the priest. He could not understand the other’s despair. Anger at Nora’s reception of her anomalous position he could understand. Anger, yes. But such abject remorse for so venial a sin—committed years and years ago—he could not understand. That this Nora was the priest’s own child, they had all known long ago. Even David. But everybody intimately concerned in the matter, excepting the father and child, were probably long ago dead. Or, if living, long resigned to the forgotten scandal. Nobody would be stupid enough to bear a grudge all these years. According to the Talmud he who had become resigned to the loss of his property—had given up hope of recovering it—had no further claim upon such property. Let the priest take his daughter and go his way. Who should make any claims? And who for that matter could bear him a grudge? Let him take his daughter and go his way. Let them leave Davy to him and to Israel. Let him take his daughter and go his way. Only God could have a grudge against the priest. And perhaps God was not so particular about the registry office. According to the law of God and Israel, consummation was in itself legalization of marriage.

‘Calm yourself, Cardinal. Calm yourself,’ he ventured, weighing down the other’s arm. ‘The Talmud says—listen—that three partners share the business of childbirth. Father, mother and God. Now surely you don’t believe that God would partner a crime, Cardinal? A man before a priest? No harm in that, surely! Don’t worry, Cardinal. I wouldn’t if she were MY daughter! Let me tell you, Cardinal, that the girl’s almost eaten into my old heart. Seems to go out of her way to remind me that once I also had a daughter. Ah! If she had only been a Jewish girl—! But it can’t be. She understands. She knows. She heard when I spoke to David. She knows. All that the world has left of David belongs to his people. All. I know the lad. He’ll never love again. And better so. He will suffer. Suffer and be lonely. Lonely and strong——’

Moses had succeeded. Darrel listened. No longer beat his breast. Brooded into normality. Darrel listened, realized that here a madman babbled, a one-furrow fanatic. Like himself. Fell away from him delusion of Heaven-sent grace. He began to see himself for what he was. A human being, male, over middle-age, yearning for companionship—the companionship of his own child. Of course he was a Christian, a Catholic, a worshipper of the Lord Jesus Christ. But somehow enthusiasm was sadly lacking. There seemed little difference between Christian and Jew, and heathen Chinee for that matter. Gaps? Yes. But bridged by a network of bridges. Bridges built up by the social yearnings of a common humanity. Idols? Yes, there were idols, of course. And their names were Separation, Reserve, Loneliness. And worship of these idols the one unforgivable sin against the God of Human Sociability. Branded the sinner as antihuman. Mad. He drew away from the other’s babbling; interrupted and faced the babbler.

‘Mr. Moses,’ he spoke slowly, as if seeking for words. ‘Do you realize what you are doing? Think you my child is less than her father that she should love a second time? Do you realize what you are doing? That you are driving your Davy into the great, mad loneliness that has been yours and mine. Are we not lonely? Is not our loneliness sufficient? I have laboured for Christianity—you for Zionism—are we not lonely? Your daughter left you in days gone by. Now mine casts my shame and my sin and my sorrow into my face and—shrinks from me. Are we not enough? David, too?’

‘Only the lonely are strong,’ platitudinated Moses. ‘Only the single-hearted can achieve. Only the lonely can lead.’

‘And is it good to be lonely? His father and mother, robbed of their hopes for grandchildren—are they great enough, strong enough to be lonely? What is there left for my child? The convent?’

‘You do not understand,’ irritably retorted Mr. Moses. ‘You do not understand, Cardinal! Zionism is not an end but a means—a way for world salvation. You serve your God—I mine. Two in one—not three in one. God and Mankind. One God. One humanity. Israel’s message. The world’s salvation. The one hope of poor, distracted humanity. What matter the sorrows of you, me—any individuals? We Jews have never flinched from sorrow. Without sorrow one cannot preach God. We left our land to preach God. Twenty-five hundred years ago when Babylon conquered us. Then first began our wanderings. And the same century saw religion rising in India—Persia—China—Greece. Hellenism, too, like Christianity, like Islam, all straying children of Judaism. Naughty children. Yet children nevertheless, subconsciously turning to their common mother. Catholicism, Protestantism, Unitarianism—stages of the Gentile struggle towards the one God. But not enough. We Jews must now go back home once again—to suck new strength from our mother-soil. New strength—new wisdom—to enable us to teach the corollary to the religion of the One God. The religion of One Mankind. We must teach nations. We must become a nation so that the nations shall listen to us. Therefore to delay our fullest nationhood is to delay world-salvation. Israel Landless means no law from Zion. No law of the One Mankind. Israel Landless is therefore the only sorrow in the world—to remove it what matter how many individuals be sacrificed? You are a Christian priest. A great Christian priest. How can you demur against sacrifice? Have you never sacrificed?’

The priest choked back a blasphemously bitter laugh. Never sacrificed? He would show this Jew how a Christian sacrificed. Never sacrificed? Those years of loneliness, of fiery zeal, of irritation, of hair-shirt and scourge—never sacrificed! And at the last how Christ had cheated him? But perhaps he had not sacrificed enough? Was there nothing left for him to sacrifice? His clenched fist was still holding the little gold cross torn from Nora’s neck. He felt it enter into his flesh. Through his palm to the bone. O yes, he still had some things left to sacrifice. His life, for instance. The life he had planned with his child. Her passionate hate would die away. Her loneliness would drive her to him—or to the convent. The father suddenly shivered at the thought of Nora a nun. A remembered phrase of old schooling flashed in his mind:

Que diable ferait-elle dans cette galère?

‘And still can sacrifice,’ he answered Moses. ‘Still can sacrifice to prevent this great wrong. You speak presumptuously. As though you indeed were the Master I hear you called. As though you were indeed a master of persons and events. As though you were the master-priest of some moloch-image. As though the war—we all—everything exist only to feed your idol which you call falsely by the name of the Lord God of Israel. Deluded like all idolaters you cannot see that it is your loneliness that you have reared upon the altar. Your loneliness to which myself and my child and the boy and his parents must all be sacrificed. But I can bring home to you your idolatry. I can uncover your idol’s feet. I can show the clay. You need no longer be lonely. No longer lonely. If—I—wish. Not you are the master. Not you but I. I who can this day make your idolatrous loneliness crumble into nothing—nothing.’

‘You know not what you say, Cardinal,’ harshly spoke the Master as he backed away from his tempter. Backed until he felt the table at his side. Gripped weakly the back of a chair while Darrel gripped his cross till the blood oozed from his palm. A snarl of fear crept into the Master’s voice.

‘You know not what you say, Cardinal,’ he repeated. ‘And suppose my loneliness be my god—is it a god of yesterday? Have its foundations not set? You take away my loneliness? You? Can you, after twenty years, give me back a pure Jewish maid, Rachel? Beware Cardinal! I have not schooled myself so long, I have not hidden my loneliness so deep, for even a cardinal to drag it out into the light and taunt me with its shadow!’

‘What would you give me, Master,’ bargained the priest, ‘if I took your loneliness away from you?’

Now it was the turn of Moses to beat his breast.

‘Down—down—rebellious heart—down! Blessed be the true Judge! I defy you, Priest! Would you stir this heart up in new revolt against God’s just decree? Have you been torn from David to fasten on me? Think you a renegade prostitute sufficient bribe for the soul of a Hebrew-master?’

‘Christ forgive you,’ gave Darrel a startled cry. ‘She is dead!’

‘God forgive you!’ retorted Moses. ‘She died twenty years ago!’

They stared at each other silently, balefully, till Darrel spoke again.

‘Is it not the Law with you that if a Jewess bear a child—no matter who the father—the child is Jewish—of the race?’

‘What—’ snarled Moses—‘has a Christian priest to do with the Law of Israel?’

‘You taunted me with sacrifice,’ spoke the priest huskily and was glad of the pain in his bloody palm that nerved him for the ordeal. ‘The Christian faith is the faith of sacrifice—self-sacrifice—atonement. I would atone for myself and for those innocents whom you would sacrifice to your loneliness. I would give myself in their place. In the place of David—his parents—Nora—yourself. I would hear again from you that “God forgive you!” ’

‘What have you to do with forgiveness and me?’ The fear began to dominate the snarl in Moses’ voice. Steadily spoke the priest.

‘If I take away your loneliness—if in place of the Rachel you once lost I give you back—snatched from the loneliness of the convent—not a Christian girl—not a Catholic girl—not, in accordance with your law, a shikseh—but one of the race—a Jewish girl—your daughter Rachel’s child—my child . . . will you give me again, this time in simple good faith, that “God forgive you!” ’

Moses fell back a tottering step. Leaned against the table. Clutched at the chair for support. His lower limbs quaked. His underlip dropped. His body sagged into the chair.

Through the kitchen, past the silently weeping Sarah, a tired girl crept like a beaten dog. Before the drawing-room door she halted, nervous, undecided, and heard the Master mumble. Only fragmentary words came to her. ‘Nora—Rachel—your uncle’s young—you—priest—’ and then her father’s steady, grave voice: ‘Not then was I a priest.’ She reached out her hand to enter and display her new humility to her father when his voice suddenly broke into a hoarse, hysterical torrent of words that had at last burst their too-long restraining dam. And the words coursed madly, jostled one another, crowding, screaming, stammering.

‘I had quarrelled with my uncle,’ heard Nora, ‘on matters of faith. I had booked my passage to Rome. I was leaving England. That night. It was warm. Hot. For the last time we met. For the last time. It was warm. Hot. We loved one another. Helplessly. Hopelessly. Furtively. We walked far—far. She cried. Cried to me not—not to go. Not to go. And—and we—Christ forgive me! Forgive me!—we—no! No! No!—I went away. Never thought. Never knew. Nature—nature had cheated us. Betrayed us. Cheated us. Tricked us. Forgive me! O Christ forgive me! I went away. Went away. Could not rest. Before I became a priest I came back. Back. I had learned. I was afraid. Frightened I had learned. Frightened. I came back. She was gone. Gone. I was afraid. I had learned. She was gone. I searched. Searched for her. Hunted her. I was frightened. Frightened. I wanted her. Wanted her. Wanted to marry her. Anything—ANYTHING! I was frightened. At last—last—in a workhouse hospital. Dying. God! O God! I DIDN’T KNOW! I DIDN’T KNOW—DIDN’T KNOW!’ Into Nora’s heart crept a chill placidity. Ere she could swoon she had hold of the doorknob and was turning it.

Moses summoned up all his hate, bent forward and spoke very quietly:

‘May the curse of God come upon—’ The vision of Nora between them broke off his curse. She stood humbly in front of Darrel. Her arms hung helplessly down her sides. Her voice was tired and listless and barely reached the exhausted youth fumbling at the bay window.

‘I’m sorry if I said anything, father,’ said the girl. ‘I’ve no right to judge what happened so long ago. Do what you will with me, father. Only take me away. I’m so tired, father.’

‘Stand away from him, Rachel,’ called the Master harshly, just failing to rise from his chair. ‘Stand away from him that I may curse him. You are an angel in my path!’

The girl turned from her father and approached Moses before whom she stood and spoke as she had stood and spoken before her father.

‘I don’t understand why you call me Rachel, Master. There’s such a lot I can’t understand. But you mustn’t curse, please. You mustn’t curse my father, please, Master.’

Sarah had sensed the girl’s passing through the kitchen as the door closed after her. For a moment she sat. Then she rose, wiped her eyes and sought a vent for the bitterness in her heart. From the drawing-room penetrated the wild confession of the priest. After it a pause which irritated her. She could bear it no longer. In the hall she heard the girl’s heavy listless words. Sarah opened the drawing-room door and entered, the light of battle in her moist eyes. From the smoking-room Barnett, kicking irritably aside the newspapers, followed his wife. He would also find something to say.

‘Vhat’s de matter?’ cried Sarah bursting upon the scene. ‘Vhat’s de matter? Tink because my Davy’s mad, dis house is a lun’tic ’sylum?’

‘Vhat you don’ mit our Davy?’ cried after her Barnett, seeking his son. ‘Vhat you don’ mit our Davy, Nora—ha?—HA? Donnt you tink he’s meshuggé enoff mitout you jilting him und making him more mad—ha?—HA? Und you, Mr. Moses, d’you tink all your Zionism’s vorrt’ vone minute off my boy’s happiness—ha?—HA? Oi! You still here, Mr. Carrdinal! Vaiting to converrt anybody else—ha? If Davy’s vife must be a carrdinal’s daughter, donnt you tink Davy’s fader-mudder vould also not be a bad catch—ha? HA?’

‘Help me, Rachel. Help me,’ mumbled Moses as he took the arm of the chilled and tired girl.

Reb Zalman smiled as he saw the figure of Davy disappear through the window. He began to totter feebly up the garden path to the front door.

By the side of the girl, in front of the Master, stood Davy, his new humility strange and strong in him.

‘You win, Master,’ he spoke listlessly, his one arm hanging helplessly down his right side. ‘You win. I feel like a broken shuttlecock that the stars have broken. You win. But I can’t wish you joy of your winning. Do what you like with me Master. You might make better use of this—this ME than I can.’

‘Help me, Rachel,’ mumbled the Master, rising with an effort on the girl’s arm and shoulder. ‘Just in time, Rachel. Just in time. Just—in—time. Strange—strange—so suddenly—suddenly—to grow old—old.’ All regard Moses wonderingly. All but Darrel, who looks steadily down upon the trickle of blood from under the palm of his hand. Barnett nudged Sarah, tapped his forehead and whispered:

‘Tinks Nora’s dat Rachel of his—ha?’

Sarah nudged him back with interest and whispered: ‘Gorn! YOU to’ched! Cannt you smell?’

Barnett started. Of course! He stared from Darrel to Moses and from Moses to Nora. The truth dawned upon him. He hurried to the cabinet; busied himself with a bottle of Palestinian brandy and some glasses.

Reb Zalman’s ring had not been heard. The maid now waited for him to rest himself in the hall. Her mind flew back a year, and she hoped the Rabbi was not going to frighten her again. How old he looked! As if he were ready to die. But there was no sadness in his face. Only a look of longing and weariness and expectation.

‘David,’ began Moses, laying his free arm on his shoulder and supporting himself so between the two youngsters. ‘Davy, forgive me. I trained you to be a master in Israel. Lonely like myself. Younger. Stronger. Don’t call me Master any more, Davy. I’m no longer lonely. Only weak. A weak, old man. No longer lonely. No longer strong. Forgive me, Davy. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you can be strong without being lonely. I don’t know. I am not strong anymore. Not lonely. Bear with me, Davy. Once—once I had a wife. A wife, Davy. Her name was Rachel. She—she died an hour after our child was born. I called her Rachel after my dead darling. She grew up wise and good and kept my house. I—I worshipped her more than God, Davy. More than God. And God grew jealous. Took away my idol. Long ago. Twenty years ago. And now that I have become so old and tired—God took pity on me. Sent her back to me. Not her. Bear with me, Davy. I’m only an old man. She loves you, this Rachel. My daughter Rachel’s child. The child of her shame. Brought up in a strange faith. Forgive me, Davy. Will you let her be your wife, Davy? And teach her—’

But David and Nora were not listening. In their ears murmured the strong hum of life. They were seeking happiness in each other’s eyes. Sarah sank softly upon a chair and began to cry for joy. Moses mumbled on with none to listen to him. Darrel held up his crossed palm to his eyes and stared idly at the trickle of blood. Barnett finished fumbling at the cabinet and came forward with a trayful of filled whisky glasses. Before setting the tray on the occasional table by Weeping and Willow’s, he selected his own dose which he now raised in toast.

‘Nora! Davy! Lechayyim (long life)! De sooner Reb Zalman makes a job of you, de qvicker! Two-und-a-haf pretzent discount if you orrder de vedding clo’s from de olld ferrm—ha? Und YOU, Mr. Carrdinal, can write out anodder cheque for de honneymoon expenses—ha? Und vhen you vant a holiday from de Pope-business und promise not to converrt him—you can comm und play mit OUR grandsonn—next yerr! Und YOU, Master, in a few yerrs time, please God! you can begin training you great granchil’ to take us all to Palestine—ha? Und YOU, Sarah, instead of crying like a voman, should lift up you hands to God you got such a husband like me—HA? Nu, everybody—’ he raised his glass.

But Darrel here made a sudden bid for happiness. He repented his repentance. If he had to choose between his child and God—between his child and Christ—he would choose his child.

‘NORA!’ he cried, and in that little word packed all his passion and pain and regret and longing and bitterness and futility. The girl trembled free from the Master’s feeble clutch. For a long time she journeyed. Such a long time—and yet she was only half-way to her father when in her ears—in her heart sounded a weak, husky, senile cry:

‘RACHEL!’

Now what should she do? Should she go on or back? What should she do? What should she do? Why didn’t somebody decide for her before those two mountain faces tore her in two? Why didn’t someone tell her what she should do? Why didn’t someone do something—decide for her?

David laughed. Those two old men with their NORA! and their RACHEL! What did they want with the girl? They were old. She was young. Young like himself. Old to old and young to young! Of course! And with hearty laughter he negated their preposterous claims. Sanity rang in his thin, vibrant tenor. Happiness danced in his laughing eyes. Scurried from his happy laughter the last laggard imps of his shell-shock.

‘NO!’ he gurgled with merriment. Whirled the girl off her feet with his strong right arm. She clung to him and forgot on all the rest of the world. Awoke from her trance and laughed back at him. Heard herself called by her old pet name. Barnett drank off his glass, broke it for luck, cried ‘MAZELTOV! MAZELTOV!’ and the two in their embrace heard him not. Not even when he pulled Sarah from her chair and pranced her round to the traditional tri-bam-im-bim tune. What mattered to them Master or priest—God or Christ—father or mother? Life held them. Gripped them. Pressed them together. What! Nora? Rachel? Nobody called her ‘Chucky’ any more? O how gorgeous—scrumptious—to be swung off her feet and kissed before them all—owned before them all—and, between the kissing, to hear her darling singing—laughing—shouting—claiming her in front of them all as his ‘Chucky! CHUCKY! CHUCKY!’

The maid primly opened the door and announced: ‘Reb Zalman.’

Dialect and spelling inconsistencies have been retained as published in the original publication. There are many examples throughout.

Other obvious typographic errors and misplaced punctuation have been corrected.

[The end of The Five Books of Mr. Moses by Izak Goller]