Only the eldest girl listened to these conversations, and she used to hold her head high, and her face would go pale as ferociously she followed up the ideas they suggested to her.

But Abramovich could bring no consolation. Jacob would not go back to the stick-polishing, and at last he could bear it no longer, went out and bought a clean collar, clipped his beard, and without a word of farewell, went to America.

[II
POVERTY]

THEN followed, for Golda, the blackest years of her life. She removed once more to one room in Gun Street, and she and the two boys earned enough to keep body and soul together. She found work in other people’s houses, helped at parties, and when nothing else was available she went to a little restaurant to assist as scullery-maid, and stayed after closing-time to scrub the tables and sweep the floor. For this she was given crusts of bread and scraps from the plates. She never had a word from her husband, and she knew she would not hear unless he made money. If he failed again, as of course he would, he would live in silence, solitary, proud, avoiding his fellow-men, who would have nothing to do with him except he made the surrender of dignity which it was impossible for him to make. She would not hear from him, and he would return one day unannounced, without a word, as though he had come from the next street; and as likely as not he would have given the coat off his back to some one poorer than himself. . . . Jacob was like that. He would give away on an impulse things that it had cost him weeks of saving to acquire. Low as he stood in the world, he seemed always to be looking downwards, as though he could believe in what came up from the depths but not in anything that went beyond him. Golda could not understand him, but she believed in him absolutely. She knew that he suffered even more than she, and she had learned from him not to complain. The Jews had always suffered. That was made clear in the synagogue, where, in wailing over the captivity in Babylon, Golda found a vent for her own sorrows. She would weep over the sufferings of her race as she wept for those who were dead, her father and her mother, and her father’s father and her little brother, on the anniversary of their death. However poor she might be she had money to buy candles for them, and whatever the cost she kept the observances of her religion.

So she lived isolated and proud, untouched by the excitements her children found in the houses of their friends and in the streets.

Very wild was the life in the neighbourhood of Gun Street. There were constant feuds between Jews and Christians, battles with fists and sticks and stones. Old Jews were insulted and pelted by Christian youths, and the young Jews would take up their cause. There were violent disputes between landlords and tenants, husbands and wives, prostitutes and their bullies. Any evening, walking along Gun Street, you might hear screaming and growling in one of the little houses. Louder and louder it would grow. Suddenly the male voice would be silent, the female would rise to a shriek, the door would open, and out into the street would be propelled a half-naked woman. She would wail and batter on the door, and, if that were of no avail, she would go to the house of a friend and silence would come again. . . . Or sometimes a door would open and a man would be shot out to lie limp and flabby in the gutter.

Harry, the second boy, took to this wild life like a duck to water. He practised with dumb-bells and learned the art of boxing, and so excited Mendel with his feats of strength that he too practised exercises and learned to stand on his hands, and cheerfully allowed his brother to knock him down over and over again in his ambition to learn the elements of defence and the use of the straight left. In vain: his brain was not quick enough, or was too quick. His hands would never obey him in time, but he dreamed of being a strong man, the strongest man in the world, who by sheer muscle should compel universal admiration and assume authority.

In the family the child’s superiority was acknowledged tacitly. He had his way in everything. He wanted such strange things, and was adamant in his whims. If he were not allowed to do as he wished, he lay on the ground and roared until he was humoured; or he would refuse to eat; or he would go out of the house with the intention of losing himself. As he was known all through the neighbourhood for his beauty that was impossible. He was an object of pride to the neighbours, and whenever he was found far from home, there was always some one who knew him to take him back. But Golda could not realize this, and she suffered tortures.

The boy loved the streets and the shops, the markets with their fruit-stalls and fish-barrows, the brilliant colours in Petticoat Lane. He would wander drinking in with his eyes colour and beauty, shaking with emotion at the sight of the pretty little girls with their little round faces, their ivory skins, and their brilliant black eyes. Ugliness hurt him not at all. It was the condition of things, the dark chaos out of which flashed beauty. But cruelty could drive him nearly mad, and he would tremble with rage and terror at the sight of a woman with a bloody face or a man kicking a horse.