Children of the Ghetto Part 16

"I will have my own way: I shan't go."

The door was thrown open suddenly.

"Oh yes thou wilt," said the Rebbitzin. "Thou art not going to bury thyself alive."

CHAPTER VIII.

ESTHER AND HER CHILDREN.

Esther Ansell did not welcome Levi Jacobs warmly. She had just cleared away the breakfast things and was looking forward to a glorious day's reading, and the advent of a visitor did not gratify her. And yet Levi Jacobs was a good-looking boy with brown hair and eyes, a dark glowing complexion and ruddy lips--a sort of reduced masculine edition of Hannah.

"I've come to play I-spy-I, Solomon," he said when he entered "My, don't you live high up!"

"I thought you had to go to school," Solomon observed with a stare.

"Ours isn't a board school," Levi explained. "You might introduce a fellow to your sister."

"Garn! You know Esther right enough," said Solomon and began to whistle carelessly.

"How are you, Esther?" said Levi awkwardly.

"I'm very well, thank you," said Esther, looking up from a little brown-covered book and looking down at it again.

She was crouching on the fender trying to get some warmth at the little fire extracted from Reb Shemuel's half-crown. December continued gray; the room was dim and a spurt of flame played on her pale earnest face.

It was a face that never lost a certain ardency of color even at its palest: the hair was dark and abundant, the eyes were large and thoughtful, the nose slightly aquiline and the whole cast of the features betrayed the Polish origin. The forehead was rather low. Esther had nice teeth which accident had preserved white. It was an arrestive rather than a beautiful face, though charming enough when she smiled. If the grace and candor of childhood could have been disengaged from the face, it would have been easier to say whether it was absolutely pretty.

It came nearer being so on Sabbaths and holidays when scholastic supervision was removed and the hair was free to fall loosely about the shoulders instead of being screwed up into the pendulous plait so dear to the educational eye. Esther could have earned a penny quite easily by sacrificing her tresses and going about with close-cropped head like a boy, for her teacher never failed thus to reward the shorn, but in the darkest hours of hunger she held on to her hair as her mother had done before her. The prospects of Esther's post-nuptial wig were not brilliant. She was not tall for a girl who is getting on for twelve; but some little girls shoot up suddenly and there was considerable room for hope.

Sarah and Isaac were romping noisily about and under the beds; Rachel was at the table, knitting a scarf for Solomon; the grandmother pored over a bulky enchiridion for pious women, written in jargon. Moses was out in search of work. No one took any notice of the visitor.

"What's that you're reading?" he asked Esther politely.

"Oh nothing," said Esther with a start, closing the book as if fearful he might want to look over her shoulder.

"I don't see the fun of reading books out of school," said Levi.

"Oh, but we don't read school books," said Solomon defensively.

"I don't care. It's stupid."

"At that rate you could never read books when you're grown up," said Esther contemptuously.

"No, of course not," admitted Levi. "Otherwise where would be the fun of being grown up? After I leave school I don't intend to open a book."

"No? Perhaps you'll open a shop," said Solomon.

"What will you do when it rains?" asked Esther crus.h.i.+ngly.

"I shall smoke," replied Levi loftily.

"Yes, but suppose it's _Shabbos_," swiftly rejoined Esther.

Levi was nonplussed. "Well, it can't rain all day and there are only fifty-two _Shabbosim_ in the year," he said lamely. "A man can always do something."

"I think there's more pleasure in reading than in doing something,"

remarked Esther.

"Yes, you're a girl," Levi reminded her, "and girls are expected to stay indoors. Look at my sister Hannah. She reads, too. But a man can be out doing what he pleases, eh, Solomon?"

"Yes, of course we've got the best of it," said Solomon. "The Prayer-book shows that. Don't I say every morning 'Blessed art Thou, O Lord our G.o.d, who hast not made me a woman'?"

"I don't know whether you do say it. You certainly have got to," said Esther witheringly.

"'Sh," said Solomon, winking in the direction of the grandmother.

"It doesn't matter," said Esther calmly. "She can't understand what I'm saying."

"I don't know," said Solomon dubiously. "She sometimes catches more than you bargain for."

"And then, _you_ catch more than you bargain for," said Rachel, looking up roguishly from her knitting.

Solomon stuck his tongue in his cheek and grimaced.

Isaac came behind Levi and gave his coat a pull and toddled off with a yell of delight.

"Be quiet, Ikey!" cried Esther. "If you don't behave better I shan't sleep in your new bed."

"Oh yeth, you mutht, Ethty," lisped Ikey, his elfish face growing grave.

He went about depressed for some seconds.

"Kids are a beastly nuisance," said Levi, "don't you think so, Esther?"

"Oh no, not always," said the little girl. "Besides we were all kids once."

"That's what I complain of," said Levi. "We ought to be all born grown-up."

"But that's impossible!" put in Rachel.

"It isn't impossible at all," said Esther. "Look at Adam and Eve!"

Levi looked at Esther gratefully instead. He felt nearer to her and thought of persuading her into playing Kiss-in-the-Ring. But he found it difficult to back out of his undertaking to play I-spy-I with Solomon; and in the end he had to leave Esther to her book.

She had little in common with her brother Solomon, least of all humor and animal spirits. Even before the responsibilities of heads.h.i.+p had come upon her she was a preternaturally thoughtful little girl who had strange intuitions about things and was doomed to work out her own salvation as a metaphysician. When she asked her mother who made G.o.d, a slap in the face demonstrated to her the limits of human inquiry. The natural instinct of the child over-rode the long travail of the race to conceive an abstract Deity, and Esther pictured G.o.d as a mammoth cloud.

In early years Esther imagined that the "body" that was buried when a person died was the corpse decapitated and she often puzzled herself to think what was done with the isolated head. When her mother was being tied up in grave-clothes, Esther hovered about with a real thirst for knowledge while the thoughts of all the other children were sensuously concentrated on the funeral and the glory of seeing a vehicle drive away from their own door. Esther was also disappointed at not seeing her mother's soul fly up to heaven though she watched vigilantly at the death-bed for the ascent of the long yellow hook-shaped thing. The genesis of this conception of the soul was probably to be sought in the pictorial representations of ghosts in the story-papers brought home by her eldest brother Benjamin. Strange shadowy conceptions of things more corporeal floated up from her solitary reading. Theatres she came across often, and a theatre was a kind of Babel plain or Vanity Fair in which performers and spectators were promiscuously mingled and wherein the richer folk clad in evening dress sat in thin deal boxes--the cases in Spitalfields market being Esther's main a.s.sociation with boxes. One of her day-dreams of the future was going to the theatre in a night-gown and being accommodated with an orange-box. Little rectification of such distorted views of life was to be expected from Moses Ansell, who went down to his grave without seeing even a circus, and had no interest in art apart from the "Police News" and his "Mizrach" and the synagogue decorations. Even when Esther's sceptical instinct drove her to inquire of her father how people knew that Moses got the Law on Mount Sinai, he could only repeat in horror that the Books of Moses said so, and could never be brought to see that his arguments travelled on roundabouts. She sometimes regretted that her brilliant brother Benjamin had been swallowed up by the orphan asylum, for she imagined she could have discussed many a knotty point with him. Solomon was both flippant and incompetent. But in spite of her theoretical lat.i.tudinarianism, in practice she was pious to the point of fanaticism and could scarce conceive the depths of degradation of which she heard vague horror-struck talk. There were Jews about--grown-up men and women, not insane--who struck lucifer matches on the Sabbath and housewives who carelessly mixed their b.u.t.ter-plates with their meat-plates even when they did not actually eat b.u.t.ter with meat. Esther promised herself that, please G.o.d, she would never do anything so wicked when she grew up. She at least would never fail to light the Sabbath candles nor to _kasher_ the meat. Never was child more alive to the beauty of duty, more open to the appeal of virtue, self-control, abnegation. She fasted till two o'clock on the Great White Fast when she was seven years old and accomplished the perfect feat at nine. When she read a simple little story in a prize-book, inculcating the homely moralities at which the cynic sneers, her eyes filled with tears and her breast with unselfish and dutiful determinations. She had something of the temperament of the stoic, fortified by that spiritual pride which does not look for equal goodness in others; and though she disapproved of Solomon's dodgings of duty, she did not sneak or preach, even gave him surrept.i.tious crusts of bread before he had said his prayers, especially on Sat.u.r.days and Festivals when the praying took place in _Shool_ and was liable to be prolonged till mid-day.

Esther often went to synagogue and sat in the ladies' compartment. The drone of the "Sons of the Covenant" downstairs was part of her consciousness of home, like the musty smell of the stairs, or Becky's young men through whom she had to plough her way when she went for the morning milk, or the odors of Mr. Belcovitch's rum or the whirr of his machines, or the bent, snuffy personality of the Hebrew scholar in the adjoining garret, or the dread of Dutch Debby's dog that was ultimately transformed to friendly expectation. Esther led a double life, just as she spoke two tongues. The knowledge that she was a Jewish child, whose people had had a special history, was always at the back of her consciousness; sometimes it was brought to the front by the scoffing rhymes of Christian children, who informed her that they had stuck a piece of pork upon a fork and given it to a member of her race.