Part 16

She utilized the time in preparing her sewing. She was making a night-dress with dozens and dozens of tiny tucks at the breast, all run by hand, and she was putting into the fine calico an artistic needlework absolutely futile, and with its perpetual "count two, miss two,"--infinitely trying to the eyes, especially by gas-light. The insane competition of the teachers, refining upon a Code in itself stupidly exacting, made the needlework the most distressing of all the tasks of the girl-teachers of that day. Salvina herself, with her morbid conscientiousness and desire to excel, underwent nightmares from the vexatiousness of learning how to cut holes so that they could not possibly be darned, and then darning them. When, at the head-centre, the lady demonstrator, armed with a Brobdingnagian whalebone needle, threaded with a bright red cord, executed herringboned fantasias on a canvas frame resembling a violin stand, it all looked easy enough. But when Salvina herself had to unravel a little piece of stockinette with a real needle and then fill in the hole so as to leave no trace of the crime, she was reduced to hysteria. Even the coloured threads with which she worked were a scant relief to the eye. And all this elaborate fancywork was entirely useless. At home Salvina was always at work, darning and mending; never was there a defter needle. Even the "hedge-tear-down" was neatly and expeditiously repaired, so long as she avoided the scholastic methods. "What's all this madness?" her mother had asked once, when she had tried the orthodox "Swiss darning" on a real article. And Mrs. Brill surveyed in amazement the back of the darn, which looked like Turkish towelling.

To-night Salvina could not long continue her taxing work. Her eyes ached, and she at last resolved to rise early in the morning and proceed with the night-dress then. She turned the gas low, so as to reduce the bill, and it was as if she had turned down her own spirits, for a strange melancholy now took possession of her in the silent fuscous kitchen in the denuded house, and the emptiness of the other rooms seemed to strike a chill upon her senses. There were strange creaks and ghostly noises from all parts. She fixed her thought on the one furnished bed-room now occupied by her mother, as on a symbol of life and recuperation. But the uncanny noises went on; rustlings, and patterings, and Salvina felt that she might shriek and frighten her mother. She had almost resolved to turn up the gas, when the sound of a harmonium came muffled through the wall, and the softened voices of her Christian neighbours sang a Sunday hymn. Salvina ceased to be alone; and tears bathed her cheeks, as the crude melody lilted on. She felt absorbed in some great light and love, which was somehow both a present possession and a beckoning future that awaited her soul, and it was all mysteriously mixed with the blue skies of Victoria Park, in those far-off happy days when she had gone home on her father's shoulder; and with the blue skies of those enchanted sunlit lands of art and beauty, in which she would wander in the glorious future, when she should be making a hundred and fifty a year. Paris, Venice, Athens, Madrid--how the mellifluous syllables thrilled her! One by one, in her annual summer holiday, she and her mother might see them all. Meantime she saw them all in her imagination, bathed in the light that never was on sea or land, and it was not her mother with whom she journeyed but a noble young Bayard, handsome and tender-hearted, who had imperceptibly slipped into her mother's place. Poor Salvina, with all her modesty, never saw herself as others saw her, never lost the dream of a romantic love. Lazarus's rat-tat recalled her to reality.

"I know I'm late," he said, with apologetic defiance, "but it's no pleasure to sit in an empty house. _You_ may like it, but your tastes were always peculiar, and that straw mattress on the floor isn't inviting."

"I am so sorry, dear. But then mother _must_ have the bed."

"Well, it won't last long, thank Heaven. I made the Jonases consent to the marriage before the scandal gets to them."

"So soon!" said Salvina with unconscious social satire.

"Yes, and we'll have our honeymoon travelling for Granders Brothers. She's a good sort, is Rhoda, she doesn't mind gypsying. And that saves us from the expense of completing the furniture." He paused, and added awkwardly, "I'd lend it to you, only that might give us away."

"But we don't need the furniture, dear, and don't you think they _ought_ to know--it is the rest of the world that it _doesn't_ concern."

"They are bound to know after the marriage. We've kept it dark so far, thanks to being in Hackney away from our old acquaintances and to mother's stinginess in not having encouraged new people to drop in. I've told the Jonases father was ill and might have to go away for his health. That'll pave the way to his absence from the wedding. It sounds quite grand. We'll send him to a German Spa."

Salvina did not share her brother's respect for old Jonas, who bored her with trite quotations from English literature or the Hebrew Bible. He was in sooth a pompous ignoramus, acutely conscious of being an intellectual light in an ignorant society; a green shade he wore over his left eye added to his air of dignified distinction. Foreign Jews in especial were his scorn, and he seriously imagined that his own stereotyped phrases uttered with a good English pronunciation gave his conversation an immeasurable superiority over the most original thinking tainted by a German or Yiddish accent. Salvina's timid corrections of his English quotations made him angry and imperilled Lazarus's wooing. The young man was indeed the only member of the family who cultivated relations with the Jonases, though now it would be necessary to exchange perfunctory visits. Lazarus presided over these visits in fear and trembling, glossing over any slips as to the father, who was gone to the seaside for his health. On second thoughts, Lazarus had not ventured on a German Spa.

VIII

Ere the wedding-day arrived, Salvina had to go to the seaside. Clacton-on-Sea was the somewhat plebeian place and the school-fete the occasion. Salvina looked forward to it without much personal pleasure, because of the responsibilities involved, but it was a break in the pupil-teacher's monotonous round of teaching at the school and being taught at the Centres; and in the actual expedition the children's joy was contagious and made Salvina shed secret tears of sympathy. Arrived at the beach of the stony, treeless, popular watering-place, most of the happy little girls were instantly paddling in the surf with yells of delight, while the tamer sort dug sand-pits and erected castles. Salvina, whose office on this occasion was to assist an "assistant teacher," had to keep her eye on a particular contingent. She sat down on the noisy sunlit sands with her back to the sea-wall so as to sweep the field of vision. Her nervous conscientiousness made her count her sheep at frequent intervals, and be worried over missing now this one, now that one. How her heart beat furiously and then almost stopped, when she saw a child wading out too far. No, decidedly it was a trying form of pleasure for the teacher. One bright little girl who had never beheld the sea before picked up a wonderfully smooth white pebble, and bringing it to Salvina asked if it was worth any money. Salvina held it up, extemporizing an object lesson for the benefit of the little bystanders.

"No," she said, "this is not worth any money, because you can get plenty of them without trouble, and even beautiful things are not considered valuable if anybody can have them. This stone was polished without charge by the action of the waves washing against it for millions and millions of years, and if it--"

The sudden blare of a brass band on the other side of the sea-wall made her turn her head, and there, in a brand-new room of a brand-new house on the glaring Promenade, a room radiating blatant prosperity from its stony balcony, she perceived her father, in holiday attire, and by his side a woman, buxom and yellow-haired. A hot wave of blood seemed to flood Salvina up to the eyes. So there he was luxuriating in the sun, rich and careless. All her homely instincts of work and duty rose in burning contempt. And poor Mrs. Brill had to remain cooped at home, drudging and wailing. For a second she felt she would like to throw the stone at him, but her next feeling was pain lest the sight of her should painfully embarrass him; and turning her face swiftly seawards she went on, with scarce a pause perceptible to the little girls, "If it gets worn away some more millions of years, it will be ground down to sand, like all the other stones that were once here," and as she spoke, she began to realize her own words, and a tragic sense of her own insignificance in this eternal wash of space and time seemed to reduce her to a grain of sand, and blow her about the great spaces. But the mood passed away before a fresh upwelling of concrete resentment against the self-pampered pair at the Promenade window. Nevertheless, her feeling of how their seeming satisfaction would be upset at the sight of her, made her carefully minimize the contingency, and the dread of it hovered over the day, adding to the worries over the children. But she vowed that her mother should be revenged; she, too, poor wronged one, should wallow in Promenade luxury in her future holidays; no more should she be housed in back streets without sea-views.

At night, after Mrs. Brill was in bed, Salvina could not resist saying to Lazarus, whose supper she had been keeping hot for him: "How strange! Father _is_ at the seaside."

"The dickens!" He paused, fork in hand. "You saw him at Clacton-on-Sea?"

"Yes, but don't tell mother. So we didn't tell a lie after all. I'm so glad."

"Oh, go to blazes, you and your conscience. Where was he staying?"

"In a house in the very centre of the Promenade; it's simply shocking!"

"Make me some fresh mustard, and don't moralize. Did you have a good time?"

"Not very; a little cripple-girl in my class went paddling, and joking, and dropped her crutch, and it floated away--"

"Bother your little cripple-girls. They always seem to be in your class!"

"Because my class is on the ground floor."

"Ha! ha! ha! Just your luck. By the way," he became grave, "look what a beastly letter from Kitty! Not coming to the wedding. I call it awfully selfish of her."

Kitty wrote her deep regrets, but her people had suddenly determined to go abroad and she could not lose this chance of seeing the world; "the governess's honeymoon," she christened it. Paris, Switzerland, Rome,--all the magic places were to be hers,--and Salvina, reading the letter, gasped with sympathy and longing.

But the happy traveller was represented at the wedding by a large bronze-looking knight on horseback, which towered in shining green over the insignificant gifts of the Jonas's circle; the utilitarian salad-bowls, and fish-slices, and dessert sets. One other present stood out luridly, but only to Salvina. It was a glossy arm-chair, and on the seat lay a card: "From Rhoda's loving father-in-law." When Salvina first saw this--at a family card-party, the Sunday evening before the wedding--she started and flushed so furiously that Lazarus had to give her a warning nudge, and to whisper: "Only for appearance." At the supper-table old Jonas, who carved and jested with much appreciation of his own skill in both departments, referred facetiously to the absent father, who might, nevertheless, be said to be "in the chair" on that occasion.

Salvina dressed her mother as carefully for the ceremony as though Kitty's fears were being realized and Mrs. Brill was the bride of the occasion; and so debonair a figure emerged from the ordeal that you could recognize Kitty's mother instead of Salvina's. Lazarus had spent his farewell evening of bachelorhood at an hotel, justly complaining that a mirrorless bed-room with a straw mattress was no place for a bridegroom to issue from. Never had bridegroom been so ill-treated, he grumbled; and he shook his fist imaginatively at the father who had despoiled him.

But he joined his mother and sister in the cab; and as it approached the synagogue, he said suddenly: "Don't be shocked--but I rather expect father will be at the _Shool_ (synagogue)."

"What!" and Mrs. Brill appeared like to faint.

"He wouldn't have the cheek," Salvina said reassuringly, as she pulled out the smelling-salts which Kitty had not needed.

"He wouldn't have the cheek _not_ to come," said Lazarus. "I asked him."

"You!" They glared at him in horror.

"Yes; I wasn't going to have things look funny--I hate explanations. The Jonases thought there was something queer the other night, when you both bungled the explanation of the rheumatism, spite all my coaching."

"But where did you find him?" said the mother excitedly.

"At Clacton-on-Sea."

Salvina bit her lip.

"I sent in my card,--'Laurence Beryl, of Granders Brothers.' When he saw me, I thought he would have had a fit. I told him if he didn't come up to the wedding and play heavy father, I'd summons him--"

"Summons him!" echoed Mrs. Brill.

"For stealing my old arm-chair. I remembered--ha! ha! ha!--it was I that had bought the easy-chair for myself, when we lived in Spitalfields and had only wooden chairs."

"So he _did_ send that easy-chair!" said Salvina.

"Yes; that was rather clever of him. And don't you think it's clever of me to save appearances?"

"It'll be terrible for mother!" said Salvina hotly. "Didn't you think of that?"

"She won't have to talk to him. He'll only hang round. Nobody will notice."

"It would have been better to tell the truth," cried Salvina, "or even a lie. This is only acting a lie. And it must be as painful for him as for us."

"Serve him right--the old furniture-sneak!"

"It was a mistake," Salvina persisted.

"Hush, hush, Salvina!" said Mrs. Brill. "Don't disturb your brother's festival."

"He has disturbed it himself," said Salvina, bursting into tears. "I wish, mother, we had not come."

"Here, here! This is a pretty wedding," said Lazarus.

"Hush, Salvina, hush!" said Mrs. Brill. "What does it matter to us if a dog creeps into synagogue?"

At this point the cab stopped.

"We're not there!" cried Mrs. Brill.

"No," Lazarus explained; "but we pick up father here. We must appear to arrive together."

Ere the horrified pair could protest, he opened the door, sprang out, and pushed inside a stout, rubicund man with a festal rose in his holiday coat, but a miserable, shamefaced look in his eyes. Lazarus took his seat ere a word could be spoken. The cab rolled on.

"Good-morning, Esther," he muttered. "I offered you _Get_."

"Silence!" cried Salvina, as if she had been talking to the little girls. "How dare you speak to her?" She held her mother's hand and felt the pulse beating madly.

"You old serpent--" began Mrs. Brill hotly.

"Mother!" pleaded Salvina; "not a word; he doesn't deserve it."

"In Jerusalem I could have two wives," he muttered. But no one replied.

The four human beings sat in painful silence, their knees touching. The culprit shot uneasy, surreptitious glances at his wife, so radiant in jewels and finery and with so Kitty-like a complexion. It was as if he saw her freshly, or as if he were shocked--even startled--by her retaining so much joy of life despite his desertion of her. Fortunately the strange drive only lasted a few minutes. The bridegroom's wedding-party passed into the synagogue through an avenue of sympathetic observers.

Mr. Brill had no part to play in the ceremony. The honours were carried off by Mr. Jonas, who stalked in slowly, with the bride on his arm, and a new green shade over his left eye. The rival father hovered meekly on the outskirts of the marriage-canopy amid a crowd of Jonases. Salvina stationed herself and her mother on the opposite border of the canopy, and throughout bristled, apprehensive, prohibitive, fiery, like a spaniel guarding its mistress against a bull-dog on the pounce. The bull-dog indeed was docile enough; avoiding the spaniel's eye, and trailing a spiritless tail. But the creature revived at the great wedding-feast in the hall of a hundred covers, and under the congratulations and the convivial influences tended to forget he was in disgrace. The bridegroom's parents were placed together, but Salvina changed seats with her mother, and became a buffer between the twain, a non-conducting medium through which the father could not communicate with the mother. With the latter she herself maintained a continuous conversation, and Mr. Brill soon found it more pleasant to forget his troubles in the charms of Mrs. Jonas, his other neighbour.

After the almond-pudding, a succession of speakers ranging from relatives to old friends, and even the officiating minister, gave certificates of character to the bride and the bridegroom, amid the tears of the ladies. Father Jonas made an elaborate speech beginning, "Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking," and interlarded with Hebrew quotations. Father Brill expressed the pleasure it gave him to acknowledge on behalf of himself and his dear wife, the kind things which had been said, and the delight they felt in seeing their son settled in the paths of domestic happiness, especially in connection with a scion of the house of Jonas, of whose virtues much had been said so deservedly that night. Lazarus declared, amid roars of laughter, that on this occasion only he would respond for his dear wife, but he felt sure that for the rest of their lives she would have the last word. Then the tables were cleared away and dancing began, which grew livelier as the dawn grew nearer. But long before that, Salvina had borne her mother away from the hovering bull-dog. Not, however, without a terrible scene in the homeward cab. All the volcanic flames Salvina and etiquette had suppressed during the day shot forth luridly. Burning lava was hurled against her husband, against her son, against Salvina. An impassioned inventory of the lost furniture followed, and the refrain of the whole was that she had been taken to a wedding, when all she wanted was a funeral.

IX

Salvina did not count this break-down against her mother. It was the natural revolt of nerves tried beyond endurance by Lazarus's trick. The whole episode intensified her sense of the romantic situation of her mother, and of the noble courage and dignity with which she confronted it. She wondered whether she herself would have emerged so stanchly from the ordeal of meeting a loved but faithless one, and her protective pity was tempered by a new admiration. Her admiration increased, when, as the secret gradually leaked out, her mother maintained an attitude of defiance against the world's sympathy, refused to hear stigmatizations of her husband, even from old Jonas, reserving the privilege of denunciation for her own mouth and Salvina's ear.

And now began the new life of mother and daughter. With Kitty on the Continent, Lazarus married, and the father blotted out, they had only each other. They moved back to the skirts of the Ghetto, and Mrs. Brill resumed with secret joy her old place among her old cronies. Inwardly, she had fretted at the loss of them, for which the dignity of Hackney had been but a shadowy compensation. But to Salvina she only expressed her outraged pride, the humiliation of it all, and the poor girl, unconscious of how happy her mother really was among the Ghetto gossips, tortured her brain during school-hours with the thought of her mother's lonely misery. And even if Salvina had not been compelled to give private lessons in the evenings to supplement their income, she would in any case have relinquished her Bachelorhood aspirations in order to give her time to her mother. For Mrs. Brill had no resources within herself, so far as Salvina knew. Even the great artificial universe of books and newspapers was closed to her. Salvina resolved to overcome her obstinate reluctance to learn to read, as soon as the pressure of the other private lessons relaxed. Meantime, she lived for her mother and her mother on her.

Oh, the bitterness of those private lessons after the fag of the day; the toiling to distant places on tired feet; the grinding bargains imposed by the well-to-do!

One of these fiends was a beautiful lady, haughty, with fair complexion and frosted hair, and somehow suggested to Salvina a steel engraving. She arranged graciously that Salvina should teach her little girl conversational German at half-a-crown an hour, but when Salvina started on the first lesson in the luxurious sanctum, she found two sweetly dressed sisters; who, she was informed, could not bear to be separated, and might therefore be considered one. The steel engraving herself sat there, as if to superintend, occasionally asking for the elucidation of a point. At the second lesson there were two other little girls, neighbours, the lady informed her, who had thought it would be a good opportunity for them to learn, too. Salvina expressed her pleasure and her gratitude to her patroness. At the third lesson the aunt of the two little girls was also present with a suspicious air of discipleship. When at end of the month, Salvina presented her bill at five shillings an hour, the patroness flew into a towering rage. What did it matter to her how many children partook of the hour? An hour was an hour and a bargain a bargain. Salvina had not the courage or the capital to resist. And this life of ever teaching and never learning went on, week after week, year after year. For when her salary at the school increased, the additional burden of Lazarus and his wife and children fell upon her. For her feckless brother had soon exhausted the patience of Granders Brothers; he had passed shiftlessly from employment to employment, frequently dependent on Salvina and his father-in-law till old Jonas had declared, with all the dignity of his green shade, that his son-in-law--graceless offspring of a graceless sire--must never darken his door-step again.

But the joy Mrs. Brill found in her grandchildren, the filling-out of her life, repaid Salvina amply for all the pinching necessary to subsidize her brother's household. She winced, though, to see her mother drop thoughtlessly into the glossy arm-chair presented by her absentee husband, and therein ensconced dandle Lazarus's children. Salvina was too sensitive to remind her mother, and shrank also from appearing fantastic. But that chair inspired a morbid repugnance, and one day, taking advantage of the fact that the stuffing began to extrude, she bought Lazarus a new and better easy-chair without saying why, and had the satisfaction of noting the relegation of the old one to a bed-room.

Two bright spots of colour dappled those long, monotonous years. One was Kitty; the other was the summer holiday. Kitty's mere letters from the Continent--she wrote twice during the tour--were a source of exhilaration as well as of instruction. She brought nearer all those wonderful places which Salvina still promised herself to behold one day, though year after year she went steadily to Ramsgate. For her mother shrank from sea-voyages and strange places, as much as she loved the familiar beach swarming with Jewish faces and nigger minstrels. Even Salvina's little scheme of enthroning her mother expensively on the parade at Clacton-on-Sea, that mother unconsciously thwarted, though she endured equivalent splendour at Ramsgate at three guineas a week, with much grumbling over her daughter's extravagance.