Children of the Ghetto Part 7

"Is he at home?" he asked.

"No, but I expect him back from the country every minute. I believe they have invited him for the _Pidyun Haben_ to-day."

"Oh, is that to-day?"

"Of course. Didst thou not know?"

"No, no one told me."

"Thine own sense should have told thee. Is it not the thirty-first day since the birth? But of course he won't accept when he knows that my own daughter has driven me out of her house."

"You say not!" exclaimed Moses in horror.

"I do say," said Malka, unconsciously taking up the clothes-brush and thumping with it on the table to emphasize the outrage. "I told her that when Yechezkel cried so much, it would be better to look for the pin than to dose the child for gripes. 'I dressed it myself, Mother,' says she. 'Thou art an obstinate cat's head. Milly,' says I. 'I say there _is_ a pin.' 'And I know better,' says she. 'How canst thou know better than I?' says I. 'Why, I was a mother before thou wast born.' So I unrolled the child's flannel, and sure enough underneath it just over the stomach I found--"

"The pin," concluded Moses, shaking his head gravely.

"No, not exactly. But a red mark where the pin had been p.r.i.c.king the poor little thing."

"And what did Milly say then?" said Moses in sympathetic triumph.

"Milly said it was a flea-bite! and I said, 'Gott in Himmel, Milly, dost thou want to swear my eyes away? My enemies shall have such a flea-bite.' And because Red Rivkah was in the room, Milly said I was shedding her blood in public, and she began to cry as if I had committed a crime against her in looking after her child. And I rushed out, leaving the two babies howling together. That was a week ago."

"And how is the child?"

"How should I know? I am only the grandmother, I only supplied the bed-linen it was born on."

"But is it recovered from the circ.u.mcision?"

"Oh, yes, all our family have good healing flesh. It's a fine, child, _imbeshreer_. It's got my eyes and nose. It's a rare handsome baby, _imbeshreer_. Only it won't be its mother's fault if the Almighty takes it not back again. Milly has picked up so many ignorant Lane women who come in and blight the child, by admiring it aloud, not even saying _imbeshreer_. And then there's an old witch, a beggar-woman that Ephraim, my son-in-law, used to give a s.h.i.+lling a week to. Now he only gives her ninepence. She asked him 'why?' and he said, 'I'm married now.

I can't afford more.' 'What!' she shrieked, 'you got married on my money!' And one Friday when the nurse had baby downstairs, the old beggar-woman knocked for her weekly allowance, and she opened the door, and she saw the child, and she looked at it with her Evil Eye! I hope to Heaven nothing will come of it."

"I will pray for Yechezkel," said Moses.

"Pray for Milly also, while thou art about it, that she may remember what is owing to a mother before the earth covers me. I don't know what's coming over children. Look at my Leah. She _will_ marry that Sam Levine, though he belongs to a lax English family, and I suspect his mother was a proselyte. She can't fry fish any way. I don't say anything against Sam, but still I do think my Leah might have told me before falling in love with him. And yet see how I treat them! My Michael made a _Missheberach_ for them in synagogue the Sabbath after the engagement; not a common eighteen-penny benediction, but a guinea one, with half-crown blessings thrown in for his parents and the congregation, and a gift of five s.h.i.+llings to the minister. That was of course in our own _Chevrah_, not reckoning the guinea my Michael _shnodared_ at Duke's Plaizer _Shool_. You know we always keep two seats at Duke's Plaizer as well." Duke's Plaizer was the current distortion of Duke's Place.

"What magnanimity," said Moses overawed.

"I like to do everything with decorum," said Malka. "No one can say I have ever acted otherwise than as a fine person. I dare say thou couldst do with a few s.h.i.+llings thyself now."

Moses hung his head still lower. "You see my mother is so poorly," he stammered. "She is a very old woman, and without anything to eat she may not live long."

"They ought to take her into the Aged Widows' Home. I'm sure I gave her _my_ votes."

"G.o.d shall bless you for it. But people say I was lucky enough to get my Benjamin into the Orphan Asylum, and that I ought not to have brought her from Poland. They say we grow enough poor old widows here."

"People say quite right--at least she would have starved in, a Yiddishe country, not in a land of heathens."

"But she was lonely and miserable out there, exposed to all the malice of the Christians. And I was earning a pound a week. Tailoring was a good trade then. The few roubles I used to send her did not always reach her."

"Thou hadst no right to send her anything, nor to send for her. Mothers are not everything. Thou didst marry my cousin Gittel, peace be upon him, and it was thy duty to support _her_ and her children. Thy mother took the bread out of the mouth of Gittel, and but for her my poor cousin might have been alive to-day. Believe me it was no _Mitzvah_."

_Mitzvah_ is a "portmanteau-word." It means a commandment and a good deed, the two conceptions being regarded as interchangeable.

"Nay, thou errest there," answered Moses. "'Gittel was not a phoenix which alone ate not of the Tree of Knowledge and lives for ever. Women have no need to live as long as men, for they have not so many _Mitzvahs_ to perform as men; and inasmuch as"--here his tones involuntarily a.s.sumed the argumentative sing-song--"their souls profit by all the _Mitzvahs_ performed by their husbands and children, Gittel will profit by the _Mitzvah_ I did in bringing over my mother, so that even if she did die through it, she will not be the loser thereby. It stands in the Verse that _man_ shall do the _Mitzvahs_ and live by them.

To live is a _Mitzvah_, but it is plainly one of those _Mitzvahs_ that have to be done at a definite time, from which species women, by reason of their household duties, are exempt; wherefore I would deduce by another circuit that it is not so inc.u.mbent upon women to live as upon men. Nevertheless, if G.o.d had willed it, she would have been still alive. The Holy One, blessed be He, will provide for the little ones He has sent into the world. He fed Elijah the prophet by ravens, and He will never send me a black Sabbath."

"Oh, you are a saint, Meshe," said Malka, so impressed that she admitted him to the equality of the second person plural. "If everybody knew as much _Terah_ as you, the Messiah would soon be here. Here are five s.h.i.+llings. For five s.h.i.+llings you can get a basket of lemons in the Orange Market in Duke's Place, and if you sell them in the Lane at a halfpenny each, you will make a good profit. Put aside five s.h.i.+llings of your takings and get another basket, and so you will be able to live till the tailoring picks up a bit." Moses listened as if he had never heard of the elementary principles of barter.

"May the Name, blessed be It, bless you, and may you see rejoicings on your children's children."

So Moses went away and bought dinner, treating his family to some _beuglich_, or circular twisted rolls, in his joy. But on the morrow he repaired to the Market, thinking on the way of the ethical distinction between "duties of the heart" and "duties of the limbs," as expounded in choice Hebrew by Rabbenu Bachja, and he laid out the remnant in lemons.

Then he stationed himself in Petticoat Lane, crying, in his imperfect English, "Lemans, verra good lemans, two a penny each, two a penny each!"

CHAPTER IV.

THE REDEMPTION OF THE SON AND THE DAUGHTER.

Malka did not have long to wait for her liege lord. He was a fresh-colored young man of thirty, rather good-looking, with side whiskers, keen, eager glance, and an air of perpetually doing business.

Though a native of Germany, he spoke English as well as many Lane Jews, whose comparative impiety was a certificate of British birth. Michael Birnbaum was a great man in the local little synagogue if only one of the crowd at "Duke's Plaizer." He had been successively _Gabbai_ and _Parna.s.s_, or treasurer and president, and had presented the plush curtain, with its mystical decoration of intersecting triangles, woven in silk, that hung before the Ark in which the scrolls of the Law were kept. He was the very ant.i.thesis of Moses Ansell. His energy was restless. From hawking he had risen to a profitable traffic in gold lace and Brummagem jewelry, with a large _clientele_ all over the country, before he was twenty. He touched nothing which he did not profit by; and when he married, at twenty-three, a woman nearly twice his age, the transaction was not without the usual percentage. Very soon his line was diamonds,--real diamonds. He carried, a pocket-knife which was a combination of a corkscrew, a pair of scissors, a file, a pair of tweezers, a toothpick, and half a dozen other things, and which seemed an epitome of his character. His temperament was lively, and, like Ephraim Phillips, he liked music-halls. Fortunately, Malka was too conscious of her charms to dream of jealousy.

Michael smacked her soundly on the mouth with his lips and said: "Well, mother!"

He called her mother, not because he had any children, but because she had, and it seemed a pity to multiply domestic nomenclature.

"Well, my little one," said Malka, hugging him fondly. "Have you made a good journey this time?"

"No, trade is so dull. People won't put their hands in their pockets.

And here?"

"People won't take their hands out of their pockets, lazy dogs!

Everybody is striking,--Jews with them. Unheard-of things! The bootmakers, the capmakers, the furriers! And now they say the tailors are going to strike; more fools, too, when the trade is so slack. What with one thing and another (let me put your cravat straight, my little love), it's just the people who can't afford to buy new clothes that are hard up, so that they can't afford to buy second-hand clothes either. If the Almighty is not good to us, we shall come to the Board of Guardians ourselves."

"Not quite so bad as that, mother," laughed Michael, twirling the ma.s.sive diamond ring on his finger. "How's baby? Is it ready to be redeemed?"

"Which baby?" said Malka, with well-affected agnosticism.

"Phew!" whistled Michael. "What's up now, mother?"

"Nothing, my pet, nothing."

"Well, I'm going across. Come along, mother. Oh, wait a minute. I want to brush this mud off my trousers. Is the clothes-brush here?"

"Yes, dearest one," said the unsuspecting Malka.