Esther did not know whether to laugh or to be angry; she compromised by crying. People were not so bad, after all, nor the fates so hard to her. It was only a little April shower of tears, and soon she was smiling and running upstairs to give the half-sovereign to the Greeners. It would have been ungracious to return it to Malka, and she purchased all the luxury of doing good, including the effusive benedictions of the whole family, on terms usually obtainable only by professional almoners.
Then she told Debby of her luck with the publishers. Profound was Debby's awe at the revelation that Esther was able to write stories equal to those in the London Journal. After that Debby gave up the idea of Esther living or sleeping with her; she would as soon have thought of offering a share of her bed to the authoresses of the tales under it. Debby suffered scarce any pang when her one-night companion transferred herself to Reb Shemuel's.
For it was to suggest this that Hannah had called. The idea was her father's; it came to him when she told him of Esther's strange position. But Esther said she was going to America forthwith, and she only consented on condition of being allowed to pay for her keep during her stay. The haggling was hard, but Esther won. Hannah gave up her room to Esther, and removed her own belongings to Levi's bedroom, which, except at Festival seasons, had been unused for years, though the bed was always kept ready for him. Latterly the women had had to make the bed from time to time, and air the room, when Reb Shemuel was at synagogue. Esther sent her new address to her brothers and sisters, and made inquiries as to the prospects of educated girls in the States. In reply she learnt that Rachel was engaged to be married. Her correspondents were too taken up with this gigantic fact to pay satisfactory attention to her inquiries. The old sense of protecting motherhood came back to Esther when she learnt the news. Rachel was only eighteen, but at once Esther felt middle-aged. It seemed of the fitness of things that she should go to America and resume her interrupted maternal duties. Isaac and Sarah were still little more than children, perhaps they had not yet ceased bickering about their birthdays. She knew her little ones would jump for joy, and Isaac still volunteer sleeping accommodation in his new bed, even though the necessity for it had ceased. She cried when she received the cutting from the American Jewish paper; under other circumstances she would have laughed. It was one of a batch headed 'Personals,' and ran: 'Sam Wiseberg, the handsome young drummer of Cincinnati, has become engaged to Rachel Ansell, the fair eighteen-year-old typewriter and daughter of Moses Ansell, a well-known Chicago Hebrew. Life's sweetest blessings on the pair! The marriage will take place in the Fall.' Esther dried her eyes and determined to be present at the ceremony. It is so grateful to the hesitant soul to be presented with a landmark. There was nothing to be gained now by arriving before the marriage; nay, her arrival just in time for it would clinch the festivities. Meantime she attached herself to Hannah's charitable leading-strings, alternately attracted to the Children of the Ghetto by their misery, and repulsed by their failings. She seemed to see them now in their true perspective, correcting the vivid impressions of childhood by the insight born of wider knowledge of life. The accretion of pagan superstition was greater than she had recollected. Mothers averted fever by a murmured charm and an expectoration, children in new raiment carried bits of coal or salt in their pockets to ward off the evil-eye. On the other hand, there was more resourcefulness, more pride of independence. Her knowledge of Moses Ansell had misled her into too sweeping a generalisation. And she was surprised to realise afresh how much illogical happiness flourished amid penury, ugliness, and pain. After school-hours the muggy air vibrated with the joyous laughter of little children, tossing their shuttlecocks, spinning their tops, turning their skipping-ropes, dancing to barrel-organs or circling hand-in-hand in rings to the sound of the merry traditional chants of childhood. Esther often purchased a pennyworth of exquisite pleasure by enriching some sad-eyed urchin. Hannah (whose own scanty surplus was fortunately augmented by an anonymous West-End Reform Jew who employed her as his agent) had no prepossessions to correct; no pendulum-oscillations to distract her, no sentimental illusions to sustain her. She knew the Ghetto as it was; neither expected gratitude from the poor, nor feared she might 'pauperise them,' knowing that the poor Jew never exchanges his self-respect for respect for his benefactor, but takes by way of rightful supplement to his income. She did not drive families into trickery, like the ladies of the West, by being horrified to find them eating meat. If she presided at a stall at a charitable sale of clothing, she was not disheartened if articles were snatched from under her hand, nor did she refuse loans because borrowers sometimes merely used them to evade the tallyman by getting their jewellery at cash prices. She not only gave alms to the poor, but made them givers, organising their own farthings into a powerful auxiliary of the institutions which helped them. Hannah's sweet patience soothed Esther, who had no natural aptitude for personal philanthropy; the primitive ordered pieties of the Reb's household helping to give her calm. Though she accepted the inevitable and had laughed in melancholy mockery at the exaggerated importance given to love by the novelists (including her cruder self), she dreaded meeting Raphael Leon. It was very unlikely her whereabouts would penetrate to the West; and she rarely went outside the Ghetto by day, or even walked within it in the evening. In the twilight, unless prostrated by headache, she played on Hannah's disused old-fashioned grand piano. It had one cracked note which nearly always spoiled the melody; she would not have the note repaired, taking a morbid pleasure in a fantastic analogy between the instrument and herself. On Friday nights after the Sabbath-hymns she read the Flag of Judah. She was not surprised to find Reb Shemuel beginning to look askance at his favourite paper. She noted a growing tendency in it to insist mainly on the ethical side of Judaism, salvation by works being contrasted with the salvation by spasm of popular Christianity. Once Kingsley's line, 'Do noble things, not dream them all day long,' was put forth as 'Judaism versus Christianity in a nutshell' and the writer added, 'for so thy dreams shall become noble, too.' Sometimes she fancied phrases and lines of argument were aimed at her. Was it the editor's way of keeping in touch with her, using his leaders as a medium of communication—a subtly sweet secret known only to him and her? Was it fair to his readers? Then she would remember his joke about the paper being started merely to convert her, and she would laugh. Sometimes he repeated what he had already said to her privately, so that she seemed to hear him talking.
Then she would shake her head, and say, 'I love you for your blindness, but I have the terrible gift of vision.'
CHAPTER XIV[ToC]
SIDNEY SETTLES DOWN
Mrs. Henry Goldsmith's newest seaside resort had the artistic charm which characterised everything she selected. It was a straggling, hilly, leafy village, full of archaic relics—human as well as architectural—sloping down to a gracefully curved bay, where the blue waves broke in whispers, for on summer days a halcyon calm overhung this magic spot, and the great sea stretched away, unwrinkled, ever young. There were no neutral tones in the colours of this divine picture—the sea was sapphire, the sky amethyst. There were dark red houses nestling amid foliage, and green-haired monsters of grey stone squatted about on the yellow sand, which was strewn with quaint shells and mimic earth-worms, cunningly wrought by the waves. Half a mile to the east a blue river rippled into the bay. The white bathing-tents which Mrs. Goldsmith had pitched stood out picturesquely, in harmonious contrast with the rich boscage that began to climb the hills in the background.