Chapter IV: Book ONE: East (1)

I

LONDON WHERE THE KING LIVES

THE boat-train had disgorged its passengers, who had huddled together in a crowd round the luggage as it was dragged out of the vans, and then had jostled their way out into the London they had been so long approaching. When the crowd scattered it left like a deposit a little knot of strange-looking people in brilliant clothes who stared about them pathetically and helplessly. There were three old men who seemed to be strangers to each other and a handsome Jewess with her family--two girls and three boys. The two elder boys carried on their backs the family bedding, and the youngest clung to his mother's skirts and was frightened by the noise, the hurrying crowds of people, the vastness and the ugly, complicated angular lines of the station. The woman looked disappointed and hurt. Her eyes searched through the crowds, through every fresh stream of people. She was baffled and anxious. Once or twice she was accosted, but she could not understand a word of what was said to her. At last she produced a piece of paper and showed it to a railway official, who came up thinking it was time these outlandish folk moved on. He could not read what was written on it, for the paper was very dirty and the characters were crabbed and awkwardly written. He turned to the old men, one of whom said excitedly the only English words he knew--"London--Jewish--Society." The official looked relieved. These people did not look like Jews, and the eldest girl and the little boy were lovely. He went away, and the woman, whose hopes had risen, once more looked disconsolate. The little boy buried his face in her apron and wept.

A suburban train came wheezing into the platform, which was at once alive with hurrying men in silk hats and tail-coats. Catching sight of the brilliantly attired group, the handsome woman and the lovely girl, the boys with their heads bowed beneath the billowing piles of feather bedding, some of them stopped. The little boy looked up with tears in his eyes. One man put his hand in his pocket and threw down a few coppers. Others followed his example, and the little boy ran after the showering pennies as they bounced in the air, and rolled, span, and settled. He danced from penny to penny and a crowd gathered; for, in his bright jerkin and breeches and little top-boots, dancing like a sprite, gay and wild, he was an astonishing figure to find in the grime and ugliness of the station. Silver was thrown among the pennies to keep him dancing, but at last he was exhausted and ran to his mother with his fists full of money, and the men hurried on to their offices.

The official returned with an interpreter, who discovered that the woman's name was Kühler, that she had expected to be met by her husband, that she had come from Austrian Poland, and that the address written on the piece of paper was Gun Street. The number was indecipherable.

The three old men were given instructions and they went away. The interpreter took charge of the family and led them to a refuge, where he left them, saying that he would go and find Mr. Kühler. With a roof over her head and food provided for her children, Mrs. Kühler sat stoically to wait for the husband she had not seen for two years. She had no preconceived idea of London, and this bleak, bare room was London to her, quite acceptable. The stress and the anxiety of the detestable journey were over. This was peace and good. Her husband would find her. He had come to make a home in London. He had sent for her. He would come.

Hours passed. They slept, ate, talked, walked about the room, and still Mr. Kühler did not come. The peace of the refuge was invaded with memories of the journey, the rattle, rattle, rattle of the train-wheels, the brusque officials who treated the poor travellers like parcels, the soldiers at the frontiers, the wet, bare quay in Holland, the first sight of the sea, immense, ominous, heaving, heaving up to the sky; the stinking ship that heaved like the sea and made the brain oscillate like milk in a pan; the solidity of the English quay, wet and bare, and of the English train, astonishingly comfortable. . . . And still Mr. Kühler did not come.

The girls were cold and miserable. The boys wrestled and practised feats of strength with each other to keep warm, and looked to their mother for applause. She gave it them mechanically as she sat by the little boy, whom she had laid to sleep on the bedding. He would be hungry, she thought, when he woke up, and she must get him food. There was the money which had been thrown to him, but she did not know its value. People do not throw much money away. At home people do not throw even small money away. There such a thing could not happen. There money, like everything else, avoids the poor. But this was rich England, where it rained money.

When the boy woke up she would go out and buy him something good to eat, and if Mr. Kühler did not come to-morrow she would find some work and a room, or a corner of a room, to live in. Perhaps Jacob had gone to America again. He had been there twice, and both times suddenly. People always went to America suddenly. He went out and bought a clean collar, and said he was going and would send money for her as soon as he had enough. . . . Poor Jacob, he could not endure their poverty and he would not steal, but he would always fight the soldiers and the bailiffs when they came to take the bedding. . . . The sea heaved, and it rained money. The two boys began to fight, a sudden fury in both of them. Their sisters rushed to part them and Mrs. Kühler rose.

At the end of the long room she saw Jacob peering from group to group. He looked white and ill, as he had done when he came again and again to implore her to marry him, and she felt half afraid of him, as she had done when the violent fury of love in him had broken down her resistance and dragged her from her comfortable home to the bare life he had to offer her. He came to her now with the same ungraciousness that had marked his wooing, explained to her that he had just got a job and could not get away to meet her, and turned from her to the children. The boys were grown big and strong, and the eldest girl was a beauty. He was satisfied, stooped and picked up little Mendel in his strong arms. The child woke up, gave a little grunt of pleasure as he recognized the familiar smell of his father, and went to sleep again.

"He's heavy," said Mrs. Kühler. "You cannot carry him all the way."

"His face is like a flower," said Jacob.

He went first, carrying the boy, and his family followed him into the roaring streets. The lamps were lit and the shops were dazzling. There were barrows of fruit, fish, old iron, books, cheap jewellery, all lit up with naphtha flares. The children were half frightened, half delighted. The smells and the noise of the streets excited them. Every now and then they heard snatches of their own language and were comforted. They came to shops bearing Yiddish characters and London no longer seemed to them forbiddingly foreign, though they began to feel conscious of their clothes, which made them conspicuous. The boys cursed and growled under the bedding and began to complain that they had so far to go. Mr. Kühler found the child too heavy and had to put him down. Mendel took his mother's hand and trotted along by her side.

They turned into a darkish street which ran for some length between very tall houses. It was obscure enough to allow the clear sky to be seen, patched with cloud and deep blue, starry spaces. At the end of it was a building covered with lights and illuminated signs. They shone golden and splendid. Never had Mendel seen anything so glorious, so rich, so dream-like, so clearly corresponding to that marvellous region where all his thoughts ended, passed out of his reach, and took on a brilliant and mighty life of their own, a glory greater than that of the Emperor at home. But this was England and had only a King.

"Does the King live there?" he asked his mother.

"No; that is a shop."

"Has father got a shop like that?"

"Not yet."

"Will he soon have a shop like that?"

"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."

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.

He had a friend, a Christian boy, named Artie Beech, who adored him even as Abramovich adored his father. Golda was alarmed by this friendship, thinking no good could come out of the Christians, and she tried to forbid it, but the boy had his way, and he loved Artie Beech as a child loves a doll or a king his favourite. Together the two boys used to creep home from school gazing into the shop windows. One day they saw a brightly coloured advertisement of a beef extract: a picture of a man rending a lion. "It will make you stronger than a lion," said Mendel. "Yes," said Artie, "one drop on the tip of your tongue." "I would be stronger than Harry if I ate a whole bottle," replied Mendel, and they decided to save up to buy the strength-giving elixir. It took them seven weeks to save the price of it. Then with immense excitement they bought the treasure, took it home, and, loathing the taste of it, gulped it down and tossed a button for the right to lick the cork. Feeling rather sick, they gazed at each other with frightened eyes, half expecting to swell so that they would burst their clothes. But nothing happened. Mendel took off his coat and felt his biceps and swore that they had grown. Artie took off his coat: yes, his biceps had grown too.

They went through the streets with growing confidence, and at school they were not afraid. Mendel's new arrogance led him into the only fight he ever had and he was laid low. Aching with humiliation, he shunned Artie Beech and went alone to gaze at the picture of the man rending the lion. It took him a week of hard concentrated thought to realize that the picture and its legend were not to be taken literally, and his close study led him to another and a strangely emotional interest in the picture. His eyes would travel up the line of the man's body along his arms to the lion's jaws, and then down its taut back to its paws clutching the ground. The two lines springing together, the two forms locked, gave an impression of strength, of tremendous impact, which, as the boy gazed, became so violent as to make his head ache. At the same time he began to develop an appetite for this shock, and unconsciously used his eyes so as to obtain it. It would sometimes spring up in him suddenly, without his knowing the cause of it, when he watched his mother sitting with her hands folded on her stomach, or cooking with her hand--her big, strong, working hand--on a fish or a loaf of bread.

One day in Bishopsgate, that lordly and splendid thoroughfare which led from the dark streets to the glittering world, he came on a man kneeling on the pavement with coloured chalks. First of all the man dusted the stones with his cap, and then he laid another cap full of little pieces of chalk by his side, and then he drew and smudged and smudged and drew until a slice of salmon appeared. By the side of the salmon he drew a glass of beer with a curl of froth on it and a little bunch of flowers. On another stone he drew a ship at sea in a storm, a black and green sea, and a brown and black sky. Mendel watched him enthralled. What a life! What a career! To go out into the streets and make the dull stones lovely with colour! He saw the man look up and down and then lay a penny on the salmon. A fine gentleman passed by and threw down another penny. . . . Oh, certainly, a career! To make the streets lovely, and immediately to be rewarded!

From school Mendel stole some chalk and decorated the stones in the yard at Gun Street. He drew a bottle and an onion and a fish, though this he rather despised, because it was so easy. Always he had amused himself with drawing. As a tiny child, the first time his father went to America, he drew a picture of a watch to ask for that to be sent him, and this picture had been kept by his mother. And after that he often drew, but chiefly because it made his father and mother proud of him, and they laughed happily at everything he did. The pavement artist filled him with pride and pleasure in the doing of it: and every minute out of school and away from the Rabbi he devoted to drawing. His brothers bought him a box of colours, and he painted imaginary landscapes of rivers and swans and cows and castles. Every picture he made was treasured by his mother. They seemed to her, as they did to himself, perfectly beautiful. He used his water-colours as though they were oils, and laid them on thick, to get as near the pavement artist's colours as possible. At school there were drawing-lessons, but they seemed to have no relation to this keen private pleasure of his.

In the evenings he would lie on the ground in the kitchen and paint until his eyes and his head ached. Sometimes his perpetual, silent absorption would so exasperate his brothers that they would kick his paints away and make him get up and talk to them. Then he would curse them with all the rich curses of the Yiddish language, and rush away and hide himself; for days he would live in a state of gloom and dark oppression, feeling dimly aware of a difference between him and them which it was beyond his power to explain. He would try to tell his mother what was the matter with him, but she could not understand. His happiness in painting, the keen delight that used to fill him, were to her compensation enough for her anxiety and the stress and strain of her poverty.

His little local fame procured her some relief. At school he won a prize accorded by vote for the most popular boy. This had amazed him, for he had very little traffic with the others, and during playtime used to stand with his back to the wall and his arms folded, staring with unseeing eyes. When his sister asked one of the boys why Mendel had won the vote, the answer she received was: "He _can_ draw." As a result his brothers were helped and his mother was able to get work as a sempstress. They were relieved from the poverty that paralyses. They could go from day to day and carry their deficit from week to week. They could afford friends, and the visits of friends on a ceremonious basis, and Abramovich was always trying to interest rich men in the wonderful family.

It was Abramovich who bought Mendel his first box of oil-paints, not so much to give the boy pleasure as with the idea that he might learn to paint portraits from photographs. That, however, was not in the boy's idea. He abandoned his imaginary landscapes and began to paint objects, still in the manner of the pavement artist, thrilled with the discovery that he could more and more exactly reproduce what he saw. He painted a loaf of bread and a cucumber so like the originals that Abramovich was wildly excited and rushed off to bring Mr. Jacobson, a Polish Jew, a timber-merchant and very rich, to see the marvel.

Mendel was unprepared. He sat painting in the kitchen with his mother and Lotte, his younger sister. Abramovich and Mr. Jacobson came in. Jacobson was ruddy, red-haired, with a strange broad face and a flat nose, almost negroid about the nostrils. He wore a frock-coat, a white waistcoat with a cable-chain across it, and rings upon his fingers. Mendel had a horror of him, and was overcome with shyness. Mr. Jacobson put on his spectacles, stared at the picture. "Ye-es," he said. "That bread could be eaten. That cucumber could be cut and put into the soup. The boy is all right. Eh? Ye-es, and a beautiful boy, too." Mendel writhed. Golda was almost as overcome with shyness as he. In silence she produced all the boy's drawings and pictures and laid them before the visitors. Abramovich was loud in his praises, but not too loud, for he knew that Mr. Jacobson loved to talk. And indeed it seemed that Mr. Jacobson would never stop. He stood in the middle of the room and wagged his fat, stumpy hands and held forth:--

"In my country, Mrs. Kühler, there was once a poor boy. He was always drawing. Give him a piece of paper and a pencil and he would draw anything in the world. The teacher at school had to forbid him to draw, for he would learn nothing at all. So one day the teacher could not find that boy. And where do you think they find him? Under the table. The teacher pulled him out and found in his hand a piece of paper--a piece of paper. The teacher looked down at the piece of paper and fainted away. The boy had drawn a picture of the teacher so like that he fainted away. Well, when the teacher came to himself, he said: 'Boy, did you do that?' 'Yes,' said the boy, 'I did that.' 'Then, said the teacher, 'I will tell you what you must do. You must paint a portrait of the King and take it to the King, and he will give you money, and carriages, and houses, and rings, and watches, for you and your father, and your uncles and all your family. Ahin and aher. The boy did that. He painted a portrait of the King and he took it to the palace. He went to the front door and knock, knock, knock. A lady opened the door and she said: 'What do you want, little boy?' 'I want to see the King. I have something to show him.' 'I am the Queen,' said the lady. 'You can show it to me.' The boy showed the picture and the Queen fainted away. The servants and the King came running in to see what had happened, and they stood like stone. 'Who did that?' said the King. 'I did,' said the boy. 'I don't believe him,' said the King. 'Shut him up for a day and a night, give him paint and brushes, and we will see what he can do.' Well, they shut the boy up for a day and a night, and in the morning the door was opened and the King and the Queen came in. The King took off his hat and put it on the table and it fell to the ground. That boy had painted a picture of a table so like that the King thought it was a real table and tried to put his hat on it. It is true, and the boy painted the King's portrait every Saturday until he died, and he had houses and money and footmen and statues in his garden, and his father and mother drove in their carriages and wore sables even in the summer. And some day, Mrs. Kühler, we shall see you in your carriage and this boy painting the portrait of the King."

The story was received in silence. The emotions it aroused in Golda and her son were so profound, so violent that they were dazed. The tension was relieved by a giggle from Lotte, who knew that kings do not wear hats. Mendel sat staring at his picture, which, try as he would, he could not connect with the story.

Abramovich said: "I told you so, Mrs. Kühler. I told you something would come of it." Already he was convinced that Mendel only had to go out into London to make the family's fortune.

But Golda replied: "There's time enough for that, and don't go putting ideas into the boy's head."

There was no danger of that. Mendel's was not the kind of head into which ideas are easily put. He was slow of comprehension, powerful in his instincts, and everything he perceived had to be referred to them. School was to him a perfectly extraneous experience. What he learned there was of so little use to any purpose of which he was conscious, and it could not be shared with his mother. To her schooling was the law of the land. A strange force took her boy from her every day and, as it were, imprisoned him. When he was fourteen he would be free. She must endure his captivity as she had learned to endure so much else.

When Mr. Jacobson had gone she said: "There have been boys like that, and a good boy never forgets his father and mother."

Mendel looked puzzled and said: "When _I_ drew a picture of teacher he caned me."

"Caned you?" cried Golda, horrified.

"He often does."

"Thrashed you!" cried Golda; "on the hands?"

"No," replied Mendel, "on the seat and the back."

Golda made him undress, and she gave a gasp of anger when she saw the weals and bruises on his back. "But what did you do?" she cried.

"I don't know," answered Mendel. This was true. At school he would suddenly find the teacher towering over him in a fury; he would be told to stay behind, and then he would be flogged. He had suffered more from the humiliation than from the pain inflicted. He could never understand why this fury should descend upon him out of his happy dreams. And now as his mother wept over the marks upon his body the suffering in him was released. All the feeling suppressed in him by his inability to understand came tearing out of him and he shook with rage. He could find no words to express these new emotions, which were terrible and frightened him.

Lotte came up and felt the weals on his back with her fingers, and she said: "They don't do that to girls."

"Be quiet, Lotte," said Golda. "Don't touch him. You will hurt him." And she stood staring in amazement at the boy's back. "That's an awful mess," she said to herself, and her thoughts flew back to men who had been flogged by the soldiers in Austria. But this was England, where everybody was left alone. She could not understand it. She did not know what to do. The boy could not be kept from school, for they would come and drag him to it. There were often dreadful scenes in Gun Street when children were dragged off to school. She made Lotte sit at the table and write: "Please, teacher, you must not beat my son. His back is like a railway-line, and it is not good to beat children." She could think of no threat which could intimidate the teacher, no power she could invoke to her aid. Her powerlessness appalled her. She signed the letter and thought she would go to the Rabbi and ask him what she must do. "Yes," she said, "the Rabbi will tell me, and perhaps the Rabbi will write to the teacher also." She could feel the torture in the boy, and she knew that it must be stopped. It was all very well to knock Harry or Issy about. They could put up with any amount of violence. But Mendel was different. With him pain went so deep. That was what made it horrible. He was like a very little child. It was wicked to hurt him. His silence now was almost more than she could bear.

There came a knock at the door. Lotte went to open it and gave a little scream. It was her father come back from America. He came into the room, not different by a hair from when he went away; thinner, perhaps, a little more haggard and hollow under the eyes, so that the slight squint in his right eye, injured to avoid conscription, was more pronounced. He came in as though he had returned from his day's work, nodded to his wife, and looked at the boy's back.

"Who has done that?" he asked.

"At school," replied Golda. "The teacher."

Jacob took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, picked up a chair and smashed it on the floor. Mendel put on his shirt and coat again and said: "It is like when you knocked the soldier over with the glass."

Jacob gave a roar: "Ah, you remember that? Ah! yes. That was when I had the inn near the barracks. He was an officer. Two of them came in. They were drunk, the swine! The man made for your mother and the officer for your sister. The glasses were big, with a heavy base. I took one of them . . ."

"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.

There was one extraordinarily nice man whom Harry brought to the house. His name was Kuit, and he had failed as a boxer and had become a thief, a trade in which he was an expert. His talk fascinated Mendel, and indeed the whole family. None could fail to listen when he told of his adventures and his skill. He had begun as a pickpocket, plying his trade in Bishopsgate or the Mile End Road, and to show his expertise he would run his hands over Jacob's pockets without his feeling it, and tell him what they contained. Or he would ask Golda to let him see her purse, and she would grope for it only to find that he had already taken it. He had advanced from picking pockets to the higher forms of theft: plundering hotels or dogging diamond merchants, and he was keenly interested in America. It was through him that the family knew the little that was ever revealed to them of Jacob's doings there.

Kuit said he would go to America and not return until he had ten thousand pounds, all made by honest theft, for he would only rob the rich, and, indeed, he was most generous with his earnings, and gave Golda many handsome pieces of jewellery, and he lent Jacob money when he badly needed it. That, however, was not Jacob's reason for admitting Kuit to his family circle. He liked the man, was fascinated by him, and thought his morals were his own affair. He knew his race and the poor too well to be squeamish, and never dreamed of extending his authority beyond his family. He warned Harry that if he took to Kuit's practices he would no longer be a son of his, and as the accounts of prison given to Harry by some of his acquaintances were not cheering, Harry preferred not to run any risks. Instead, he devoted himself to training for the glory of the prize-ring.

For Mendel the moral aspect of Kuit's profession had been settled once and for all by his seeing the Rabbi with his face turned to the wall, in the middle of the most terrible of prayers, filch some pennies from an overcoat. Religion therefore was one thing, life was another, and life included theft. Kuit was the only man who could think of painting apart from money, and it was Kuit who gave him a new box of oil colours, stolen from a studio which he broke into on purpose, and _en passant_ from one rich house in Kensington to another. Kuit used to say: "One thing is true for one man and another for another. And what is true for a man is what he does best. For Harry it is boxing, for Issy it is women and dancing, and for Mr. Kühler it is being honest. For me it is showing the business thieves that they cannot have things all their own way, and outwitting the police. Oh yes! They know me and I know them, but they will never catch me."

So charming was Mr. Kuit that Jacob could not object to taking care from time to time of the property that passed through his hands, and the kitchen was often splendid with marble clocks and Oriental china and Sheffield plate, which never looked anything but out of place among the cheap oleographs and the sideboard with its green paper frills round the flashing gilt china that was never used. The kitchen was the living-room of the house, for Jacob only ate when he was hungry, and it was rarely that two sat down to a meal together.

As often as not Mendel had his paints on the table, and the objects he was painting were not to be moved. He clung to his painting as the only comfort in his distress, and he would frequently work away with his brushes though he could hardly see what he was at, and knew that he was entirely devoid of the feeling that until the discomfort broke out in his soul had never failed him. He dared not look outside his circumstances for comfort, and within them was the most absolute denial of that cherished feeling for loveliness and colour. Beyond certain streets he never ventured. He felt lost outside the immediate neighbourhood of his home, and only Mr. Kuit reassured him with the confidence with which he spoke of such remote regions as Kensington and Bayswater and Mayfair. The rest clung to the little district where the shops and the language and the smells were Jewish. Yet there, too, Mendel felt lost, though he had an immense reverence for the old Jews, for the Rabbis who pored all day long over their books, and the ancient bearded men who, like his mother, could sit for hours together doing nothing at all. He loved their tragic, wrinkled faces and their steadfast peace, so stark a contrast to the chatter and the wrangling and the harshness that filled his home.

There were constant rows. Harry upset the household for weeks after his father forbade him to pursue his prize-fighting ambitions. Jacob would not have a son of his making a public show of himself. To that disturbance was added another when Issy began to court, or was courted by, a girl who was thought too poor and base-born. If he was out a minute later than half-past nine Jacob would go out and find him at the corner of the street with the girl in his arms. Issy would be dragged away. Then he would sulk or shout that he was a man, and Jacob would tell him in a cold, furious voice that he could go if he liked, but, if he went, he must never show his face there again. For a time Issy would submit. Poor though the home was, he could not think of leaving it except to make another for himself. But there was no keeping the girl away, and he would be for ever peeping into the street to see if she were there, and if she were he could not keep away from her.