“Very soon.”
Mendel would have liked to have stood and gazed at the glorious, glittering shop. He felt sure the King must buy his boots there, and he thought that if he stayed long enough he would see the King drive up in his crystal coach, with his crown on his head, and go into the shop. But his father led the way out of the darkish street into another that was still darker, very narrow, and flanked with little low houses. One of these they entered, and in a small, almost unfurnished room they had supper, and Mendel went to sleep hearing his father say to his mother, “Thirteen shillings.” Just before that his father had held his hands out under the candle, and they were raw and bleeding.
One room was luxury to them. At home in Austria they had had a corner of a room, and the three other corners were occupied by the carpenter, the stableman, and the potter. In the centre of the room stood the common water-bucket and the common refuse-tub. London had showered money on them and provided them with a whole room. They felt hopeful.
Mr. Kühler made thirteen shillings a week polishing walking-sticks, and when that trade was bad he could sometimes get work as a furrier. He had intended to take his family over to America, but finding work in London, he thought it better to stay there. Besides, he had a grudge against America, for while there he had invented a device for twisting tails of fur, but his invention had been stolen from him and he had missed his chance of making a fortune. America was evil and living was very dear. London was the more comfortable place for the struggle. And in London he had found Abramovich, the friend of his boyhood, the one creature in the world upon whom he relied. He had no reason for his faith. Abramovich had never done him any good, but he was not of those who pass. He might disappear for years, but he always came back again, and time made no difference. He was always the same. If help was needed he gave it, and if he needed help he asked for it. Abramovich was a very strong reason for staying in London. . . . The boys would soon be working and the eldest girl was a beauty. The match-makers would be busy with her. Another two years, and the match-makers would find her a rich man who would help them all and put money into a business. That was Jacob’s desire, to have a business of his own, for he loathed working for another man. He could not do it for long. Always he ended with a quarrel, perhaps with blows, or he simply walked out and would not return.
He was a devout Jew and despised Christians, as he despised luxury, pleasure, comfort, not actively nor with any hatred. He simply did not need them. He had lived without them, and he asked nothing of life. He was alive; that was enough. Passions seized him and he followed them. Without passion he never moved, never stirred a finger except to keep himself alive. Passion had chosen his wife for him. Golda, the beautiful, was his wife. In her he was bound more firmly to his race and his faith, and there was no need to look beyond. He was rooted. She had borne him children, but he had no more ambition for them than for himself. Leah, the beauty, should wed a rich man, not for ambitious reasons, but because, in life, beauty and riches were proper mates. There is a certain orderliness about life, and certain things can only be prevented by an irruption of passion. If that happens, then life takes its revenge and becomes hard and bleak, but it is still life, and only a fool will complain. Jacob never complained, and he took his Golda’s reproaches in silence, unless she became unjust, and then he silenced her brutally and callously. She bore with him, because she prized his honesty, his steadfast simplicity, and because she knew that his passion had never wakened a profound answer in herself. She had very slowly been roused to love, which had flowered in her with the birth of her youngest child, in whom she had learned a power of acceptance almost equal to her husband’s. Like him, she clung to her race and her faith and never looked beyond.
In London she found that she was left alone and her life was no longer hemmed in by a menacing world of soldiers and police and peasants, who swore the Jews cheated them and spread terrifying tales of Jewish practices upon Christian children. Christian London was indifferent to the Jews, and she could be indifferent to Christian London. She had no curiosity about it and never went above a mile from her house. She made no attempt to learn English, but could not help gleaning a few words from her children as they picked it up at school. The synagogue was the centre of her life, and from it came all the life she cared to have outside her family. She was absorbed in little Mendel, by whom her world was coloured. If he was happy, that was sunshine to her. If he was oppressed and tearful, her sky was overcast. If he was ill, it seemed to her a menace of the end.
He was a strange child and very slow in growing into a boy. The other children had seemed to shoot into independence almost as soon as they could walk. But Mendel clung to her, would not learn to feed himself, and would not go to sleep at night unless she sang to him and rocked him in the cradle, in which he slept even after he went to school. As long as he could curl up in it he slept in his cradle, and he made her learn as much as she could of an English song which had caught his fancy. It was the only English song she ever knew, and night after night she had to sing it over and over again as she rocked the heavy cradle:—
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do;
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
She had no idea what the words meant, but the boy loved the tune and her funny accent and intonation, and even when she was ill and tired she would sing him to sleep, and then sit brooding over him with her fingers just touching his curly hair. And in her complete absorption in his odd, unchildlike childhood she was perfectly content, and entirely indifferent to all that happened outside him. Brutal things, terrible things happened, but they never touched the child, and if she could, she hid the knowledge of them from him.
Abramovich collected a little capital and persuaded Mr. Kühler to join him in a furrier’s business. They were not altogether unsuccessful, and Mr. Kühler took a whole house in Gun Street and bought a piano, but soon their capital was exhausted and they had given more credit than they were accorded and the business trickled through their fingers. Mr. Kühler took to his bed, for he could sleep at will and almost indefinitely, and so could avoid seeing poverty once more creeping up like a muddy sea round his wife and children. It had been bad enough when that happened at home, where at the worst there were his relations to help, and there were the potato fields to be despoiled, and, at least, the children could be happy playing in the roads or by the river, or on the sides of the mountain. But here in London poverty was black indeed, and there was no one but Abramovich to help, and he was in almost as bad case as himself. Yet astonishingly Abramovich came again and again to the rescue. He was a little squat, ugly man, the stunted product of some obscure Russian ghetto, and he seemed to live by and for his enthusiasm for the Kühler family. In their presence he glowed, greedily drank in every word that Jacob or Golda said, and was always loud in his praises of the beautiful children. . . . “The sky is dark now,” he used to say, “but they will be rich, and they will give you horses and carriages, and Turkey carpets, and footmen, and flowers in the winter, and they will bring English gentlemen to the house and what you want, that you shall have. . . .” “I want nothing,” Jacob would say. “I want nothing. I will work and be my own master. I will not steal or help other men to steal.” “You wait,” Abramovich would reply. “These children have only to go out into London and all will be given to them.”