Ghetto Tragedies. Israel Zangwill
her own empty life.
Suddenly Mrs. Peyser, over whose black eyes a glaze had been stealing, let the long dark eyelashes fall over them.
"Sarah!" whispered Daniel frantically. "Say the Shemang!"
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one," said the sensuous lips obediently.
Little Schnapsie shrugged her shoulders rebelliously. The dogma seemed so irrelevant.
Mrs. Peyser opened her eyes, and a beautiful mother-light came into them as she saw the weeping girl.
"Ah, Florrie, do not fret," she said reassuringly, in her long-lapsed Yiddish. "I will find thee a bridegroom."
Her eyes closed, and little Schnapsie shuddered with a weird image of a lover fetched from the shrouded dead.
VI
After his Sarah had been lowered into "The House of Life," and the excitement of the tombstone recording her virtues had subsided, Daniel would have withered away in an empty world but for little Schnapsie. The two kept house together; the same big house that had reeked with so much feminine life, and about which the odours of perfumes and powders still seemed to linger. But father and daughter only met at meals. He spent hours over the morning paper, with the old quaint delusions about India and other things he read of, and he pottered about the streets, or wandered into the Beth-Hamidrash, which a local fanatic had just instituted in North London, and in which, under the guidance of a Polish sage, Daniel strove to concentrate his aged wits on the ritual problems of Babylon. At long intervals he brushed his old-fashioned high hat carefully, and timidly rang the bell of one of his daughters' mansions, and was permitted to caress a loudly remonstrating baby; but they all lived so far from him and one another in this mighty London. From Sylvia's, where there was a boy with buttons, he had always been frightened off, and when the others began to emulate her, his visits ceased altogether. As for the sisters coming to see him, all pleaded overwhelming domestic duty, and the frigidity of Florence's reception of them. "Now if you lived alone—or with one of us!" But somehow Daniel felt the latter alternative would be as desolate as the former. And though he knew some wide vague river flowed between even his present housemate's life and his own, yet he felt far more clearly the bridge of love over which their souls passed to each other.
Figure then the septuagenarian's amaze when, one fine morning, as he was shuffling about in his carpet slippers, the servant brought him word that his six daughters demanded his instantaneous presence in the drawing-room.
The shock drove out all thoughts of toilet; his heart beat quicker with a painful premonition of he knew not what. This simultaneous visit recalled funerals, weddings. He looked out of a window and saw four carriages drawn up, and that completed his sense of something elemental. He tottered into the drawing-room—grown dingy now that it had no more daughters to dispose of—and shrank before the resplendence with which their presence reinvested it. They rustled with silks, shone with gold necklaces, and impregnated the air with its ancient aroma of powders and perfumes. He felt himself dwindling before all this pungent prosperity, like some more creative Frankenstein before a congress of his own monsters.
They did not rise as he entered. The Jewish group and the pagan group were promiscuously seated—marriage had broken down all the ancient landmarks. They all looked about the same agelessness—a standstill buxom matronhood.
Daniel stood at the door, glancing from one to another. Some coughed; others fidgeted with muffs.
"Sit down, sit down, father," said Rachael kindly, though she retained the arm-chair—and there was a general air of relief at her voice. But the old embarrassment returned as the silence reëstablished itself when Daniel had drooped into a stiff chair.
At last Leah took the word: "We have come while Florrie is at her slumming—"
"At her slumming!" repeated Sylvia, with more significance, and a meaning smile spread over the six faces.
"Yes?" Daniel murmured.
"—Because we did not want her to know of our coming."
"It concerns Schnapsie?" he murmured.
"Yes, your little Schnapsie," said Daisy viciously.
"Yes; she has no time to come and see us," cried Rebecca. "But she has plenty of time for her—slumming."
"Well, she does good," he murmured apologetically.
"A fat lot of good!" sniggered Rachael.
"To herself!" corrected Lily.
"I do not understand," he muttered uneasily.
"Well—" began Lily. "You tell him, Leah; you know more about it."
"You know as much as I do."
He looked appealingly from one to the other.
"I always said the slums were dangerous places for people of our class," said Sylvia. "She doesn't even confine herself to her own people."
The faces began to lighten—evidently they felt the ice broken.
"Dangerous!" he repeated, catching at the ominous word.
"Dreadful!" in a common shudder.
He half rose. "You have bad news?" he cried.
The faces gloomed over, the heads nodded.
"About Schnapsie?" he shrieked, jumping up.
"Sit down, sit down; she's not dead," said Leah contemptuously.
He sat down.
"Well, what is it? What has happened?"
"She's engaged!" In Leah's mouth the word sounded like a death-bell.
"Engaged!" he breathed, with a glimmering foreboding of the horror.
"To a Christian!" said Daisy brutally.
He sank back, pale and trembling. A tense silence fell on the room.
"But how? Who?" he murmured at last.
The girls recovered themselves. Now they were all speaking at once.
"Another slummer."
"He's the son of an archdeacon."
"An awful Christian crank."
"And that's your pet Schnapsie."
"If we had wanted Christians, we could have been married twenty years ago."
"It's a terrible disgrace for us."
"She doesn't consider us in the least."
"She'll be miserable, anyhow. When they quarrel, he'll always throw it up to her that she's a Jewess."
"And wouldn't join our Daughters of Mercy committee—had no time."
"Wasn't going to marry—turned up her nose at all the Jewish young men!"
"But she would have told me!" he murmured hopelessly. "I don't believe it. My little Schnapsie!"
"Don't believe it?" snorted Leah. "Why, she didn't even deny it."
"Have you spoken to her, then?"
"Have we spoken to her! Why, she says Judaism is all nonsense! She will disgrace us all."
The blind racial instinct spoke through them—the twenty-five centuries of tested separateness. But Daniel felt in super-addition the conscious religious horror.
"But is she to be married in a Christian church?" he breathed.
"Oh, she isn't going to marry—yet."
His poor heart fluttered at the reprieve.
"She doesn't care a pin for our feelings," went on Leah. "But of course she won't marry while you are alive."
Lily