“And the man spun round three times and fell flat on the floor,” said Mendel.
“Ah! you remember that? Yes. And I lifted him out into the street and left him there in the snow. I was a strong man then. I wanted nothing from them, but if they touch what is mine . . . !” He seized Mendel and lifted him high over his head. He was tremendously excited and could not be got to sit down or to talk of his doings in America or of his voyage. That was his way. He would talk in his own time. His doings would come out piecemeal, over years and years. Now he was entirely absorbed with his fury. He was nearly ill with it and could not eat. Up and down the room he walked, lashing up his rage. Mendel was sent to bed, and until he went to sleep he could hear his father pacing up and down and his mother talking, explaining, entreating.
Next morning Mendel had almost forgotten the excitement and went to school as usual. In the middle of an arithmetic lesson in walked Jacob, very white, with his head down. He went quickly up to the teacher and spoke to him quietly. The class was stunned into silence. Jacob raised his fist and the teacher went down. Jacob picked him up, shook him, and threw him into a corner. Then he shouted: “You won’t touch my boy again!” shook himself like a dog, and walked out, closing the door very quietly. The teacher hurried out and did not return. The class slowly recovered from its astonishment, shrill voices grew out of the silence like a strong wind, and books and inkpots began to fly. Soon the walls were streaked and spattered with ink and when it became known that it was Kühler’s father who had done it, Mendel found himself a hero. But he took no pride in it. He was haunted by the teacher’s white, terrified face. He had always thought of the teacher as a nice man. The thrashings inflicted on him had always seemed to him impersonal and outside humanity altogether. Yet because it was his father who had thrashed the teacher he accepted it as right. At home his father, even in his absence, was the law, and could do no wrong. The violent scene seemed to Mendel to have nothing to do with himself, and he resented having become the centre of attention.
The head master hurried in, quelled the class, went on with the lesson where it had been interrupted. Mendel could not attend. He was bewildered by a sudden realization of life outside himself. It was no longer a procession of events, figures, scenes, colours, shapes, light and darkness passing before his eyes, always charming, sometimes terrifying, but something violent which met another something in himself with a fearful impact. It could hurt him, and he knew that it was merciless, for the thing in himself that answered to it and rushed out to meet it was wild and knew no mercy either. He had heard of a thing called the maelstrom in the sea, a kind of spout, with whirling sides, down which great ships were sucked. And he felt that he was being sucked down such a spout, in which he could see all that he had ever known, the mountain and the river in Austria, the train, the telegraph wires, towns, buses, faces, the street, the school, Artie Beech, Abramovich, his father. . . . Only his mother stood firm, and from her came a force to counteract that other force which was dragging him towards the whirlpool.
He became conscious of the discomfort in which he lived and was acutely aware of the people by whom he was surrounded.
[III
PRISON]
THIS time in America Jacob had fared better, and by dint of half-starving himself and sleeping when he had nothing to do, he had managed to save over fifty pounds. Abramovich borrowed another fifty, and once again they set up in business as furriers. They took one of the old Georgian houses off Bishopsgate, started a workshop in the top rooms, and in the lower rooms the Kühler family lived, with Abramovich in lodgings round the corner. They were only twenty yards from the synagogue and Golda was happy; Jacob too, for in such a house he felt a solid man. And, indeed, amid the extreme poverty with which they were surrounded he could pass for wealthy. He had his name on a brass plate on the door and was always proud when he wrote it on a cheque. He took his eldest son into his workshop to rescue him from the fate of working for another master, and he assumed a patriarchal authority over his family. His sons were never allowed out after half-past nine, and, tall youths though they were, if they crossed his will he thrashed them. The girls were forbidden to go out alone. They were kept at home to await their fate.
The eldest boy flung all his ardour into dancing, and was the champion slow waltzer of the neighbourhood. With egg-shells on his heels to show that he never brought them to the ground, he could keep it up for hours and won many prizes. Harry scorned this polite prowess. For him the romance of the streets was irresistible: easy amorous conquests, battles of tongues and fists, visits to the prize-ring, upon which his young ambition centred. A bout between a Jew and a Christian would lead to a free-fight in the audience, for the Jews yelled in Yiddish to their champion, and the British would suspect insults to them or vile instructions, and would try to enforce silence . . . And Harry would bring gruff young men to the house, youths with puffy eyes and swollen or crooked or broken noses, and he would treat them with an enthusiastic deference which found no echo in any member of the family save Mendel, who found the world opened up to him by Harry large and adventurous, like the open sea stretching away and away from the whirlpool.