A GHETTO GROTESQUE.

CHAPTER I.

FLUTTER-DUCK IN FEATHER.

Although everybody calls her "Flutter-Duck" now, there was a time when the inventor had exclusive rights in the nickname, and used it only in the privacy of his own apartment. That time did not last long, for the inventor was Flutter-Duck's husband, and his apartment was a public work-room among other things. He gave her the name in Yiddish—Flatterkatchki—a descriptive music in syllables, full of the flutter and quack of the farm-yard. It expressed his dissatisfaction with her airy, flighty propensities, her love of gaiety and gadding. She was a butterfly, irresponsible, off to balls and parties almost once a month, and he, a self-conscious ant, resented her. From the point of view of piety she was also sadly to seek, rejecting wigs in favour of the fringe. In the weak moments of early love her husband had acquiesced in the profanity, but later all the gain to her soft prettiness did not compensate for the twinges of his conscience.

Flutter-Duck's husband was a furrier—a master-furrier, for did he not run a workshop? This workshop was also his living-room, and this living-room was also his bedroom. It was a large front room on the first floor, over a chandler's shop in an old-fashioned house in Montague Street, Whitechapel. Its shape was peculiar—an oblong stretching streetwards, interrupted in one of the longer walls by a square projection that might have been accounted a room in itself (by the landlord), and was, indeed, used as a kitchen. That the fireplace had been built in this corner was thus an advantage. Entering through the door on the grand staircase, you found yourself nearest the window with the bulk of the room on your left, and the square recess at the other end of your wall, so that you could not see it at first. At the window, which, of course, gave on Montague Street, was the bare wooden table at which the "hands"—man, woman, and boy—sat and stitched. The finished work—a confusion of fur caps, boas, tippets, and trimmings—hung over the dirty wainscot between the door and the recess. The middle of the room was quite bare, to give the workers freedom of movement, but the wall facing you was a background for luxurious furniture. First—nearest the window—came a sofa, on which even in the first years of marriage Flutter-Duck's husband sometimes lay prone, too unwell to do more than superintend the operations, for he was of a consumptive habit. Over the sofa hung a large gilt-framed mirror, the gilt protected by muslin drapings, in the corners of which flyblown paper flowers grew. Next to the sofa was a high chest of drawers crowned with dusty decanters, and after an interval filled up with the Sabbath clothes hanging on pegs and covered by a white sheet; the bed used up the rest of the space, its head and one side touching the walls, and its foot stretching towards the kitchen fire. On the wall above this fire hung another mirror,—small and narrow, and full of wavering, watery reflections,—also framed in muslin, though this time the muslin served to conceal dirt, not to protect gilt. The kitchen-dresser, decorated with pink needle-work paper, was at right angles to the fireplace, and it faced the kitchen table, at which Flutter-Duck cleaned fish, peeled potatoes, and made meat kosher by salting and soaking it, as Rabbinic law demanded.

By the foot of the bed, in the narrow wall opposite the window, was a door leading to a tiny inner room. For years this door remained locked; another family lived on the other side, and the furrier had neither the means nor the need for an extra bedroom. It was a room made for escapades and romances, connected with the back-yard by a steep ladder, up and down which the family might be seen going, and from which you could tumble into a broken-headed water-butt, or, by a dexterous back-fall, arrive in a dustbin. Jacob's ladder the neighbours called it, though the family name was Isaacs.

And over everything was the trail of the fur. The air was full of a fine fluff—a million little hairs floated about the room covering everything, insinuating themselves everywhere, getting down the backs of the workers and tickling them, getting into their lungs and making them cough, getting into their food and drink and sickening them till they learnt callousness. They awoke with "furred" tongues, and they went to bed with them. The irritating filaments gathered on their clothes, on their faces, on the crockery, on the sofa, on the mirrors (big and little), on the bed, on the decanters, on the sheet that hid the Sabbath clothes—an impalpable down overlaying everything, penetrating even to the drinking-water in the board-covered zinc bucket, and covering "Rebbitzin," the household cat, with foreign fur. And in this room, drawing such breath of life, they sat—man, woman, boy—bending over boas bewitching young ladies would skate in; stitch, stitch, from eight till two and from three to eight, with occasional overtime that ran on now and again far into the next day; till their eyelids would not keep open any longer, and they couched on the floor on a heap of finished work; stitch, stitch, winter and summer, all day long, swallowing hirsute bread and butter at nine in the morning, and pausing at tea-time for five o'clock fur. And when twilight fell the gas was lit in the crowded room, thickening still further the clogged atmosphere, charged with human breaths and street odours, and wafts from the kitchen corner and the leathery smell of the dyed skins; and at times the yellow fog would steal in to contribute its clammy vapours. And often of a winter's morning the fog arrived early, and the gas that had lighted the first hours of work would burn on all day in the thick air, flaring on the Oriental figures with that strange glamour of gas-light in fog, and throwing heavy shadows on the bare boards; glazing with satin sheen the pendent snakes of fur, illuming the bowed heads of the workers and the master's sickly face under the tasselled smoking-cap, and touching up the faded fineries of Flutter-Duck, as she flitted about, chattering and cooking.

Into such an atmosphere Flutter-Duck one day introduced a daughter, the "hands" getting an afternoon off, in honour not of the occasion but of decency. After that the crying of an infant became a feature of existence in the furrier's workshop; gradually it got rarer, as little Rachel grew up and reconciled herself to life. But the fountain of tears never quite ran dry. Rachel was a passionate child, and did not enjoy the best of parents.

Every morning Flutter-Duck, who felt very grateful to Heaven for this crowning boon,—at one time bitterly dubious,—made the child say her prayers. Flutter-Duck said them word by word, and Rachel repeated them. They were in Hebrew, and neither Flutter-Duck nor Rachel had the least idea what they meant. For years these prayers preluded stormy scenes.

"MÉdiÂni!" Flutter-Duck would begin.

"MÉdiÂni!" little Rachel would lisp in her piping voice. It was two words, but Flutter-Duck imagined it was one. She gave the syllables in recitative, the Âni just two notes higher than the mÉdi, and she accented them quite wrongly. When Rachel first grew articulate, Flutter-Duck was so overjoyed to hear the little girl echoing her, that she would often turn to her husband with an exclamation of "Thou hearest, Lewis, love?"

And he, impatiently: "Nee, nee, I hear."

Flutter-Duck, thus recalled from the pleasures of maternity to its duties, would recommence the prayer. "MÉdiÂni!"

Which little Rachel would silently ignore.

"MÉdiÂni!" Flutter-Duck's tone would now be imperative and ill-tempered.

Then little Rachel would turn to her father querulously. "She thayth it again, MÉdiÂni, father!"

And Flutter-Duck, outraged by this childish insolence, would exclaim, "Thou hearest, Lewis, love?" and incontinently fall to clouting the child. And the father, annoyed by the shrill ululation consequent upon the clouting: "Nee, nee, I hear too much." Rachel's refusal to be coerced into giving devotional over-measure was not merely due to her sense of equity. Her appetite counted for more. Prayers were the avenue to breakfast, and to pamper her featherheaded mother in repetitions was to put back the meal. Flutter-Duck was quite capable of breaking down, even in the middle, if her attention was distracted for a moment, and of trying back from the very beginning. She would, for example, get as far as "Hear—my daughter—the instruction—of thy mother," giving out the words one by one in the sacred language which was to her abracadabra.

And little Rachel, equally in the dark, would repeat obediently, "Hear—my daughter—the instruction of—thy mother." Then the kettle would boil, or Flutter-Duck would overhear a remark made by one of the "hands," and interject: "Yes, I'd give him!" or, "A fat lot she knows about it," or some phrase of that sort; after which she would grope for the lost thread of prayer, and end by ejaculating desperately:—

"MÉdiÂni!"

And the child sternly setting her face against this flippancy, there would be slapping and screaming, and if the father protested, Flutter-Duck would toss her head, and rejoin in her most dignified English: "If I bin a mother, I bin a mother!"

To the logical adult it will be obvious that the little girl's obstinacy put the breakfast still further back; but then, obstinate little girls are not logical, and when Rachel had been beaten she would eat no breakfast at all. She sat sullenly in the corner, her pretty face swollen by weeping, and her great black eyes suffused with tears. Only her father could coax her then. He would go so far as to allow her to nurse "Rebbitzin," without reminding her that the creature's touch would make her forget all she knew, and convert her into a "cat's-head." And certainly Rachel always forgot not to touch the cat. Possibly the basis of her father's psychological superstition was the fact that the cat is an unclean animal, not to be handled, for he would not touch puss himself, though her pious title of "Rebbitzin," or Rabbi's wife, was the invention of this master of nicknames. But for such flashes no one would have suspected the stern little man of humour. But he had it—dry. He called the cat "Rebbitzin" ever since the day she refused to drink milk after meat. Perhaps she was gorged with the meat. But he insisted that the cat had caught religion through living in a Jewish family, and he developed a theory that she would not eat meat till it was kosher, so that in its earlier stages it might be exposed without risk of feline larceny.

Cats are soothing to infants, but they ceased to satisfy Rachel when she grew up. Her education, while it gratified Her Majesty's Inspectors, was not calculated to eradicate the domestic rebel in her. At school she learnt of the existence of two Hebrew words, called Moudeh anÎ, but it was not till some time after that it flashed upon her that they were closely related to MÉdiÂni, and the discovery did not improve her opinion of her mother. She was a bonny child, who promised to be a beautiful girl, and her teachers petted her. They dressed well, these teachers, and Rachel ceased to consider Flutter-Duck's Sabbath shawl the standard of taste and splendour. Ere she was in her teens she grumbled at her home surroundings, and even fell foul of the all-pervading fur, thereby quarrelling with her bread and butter in more senses than one. She would open the window—strangely fastidious—to eat her bread and butter off the broad ledge outside the room, but often the fur only came flying the faster to the spot, as if in search of air; and in the winter her pretentious queasiness set everybody remonstrating and shivering in the sudden draught.

Her objection to fur did not, however, embrace the preparation of it, for after school hours the little girl sat patiently stitching till late at night, by way of apprenticeship to her future, buoyed up by her earnings, and adding strip to strip, with the hair going all the same way, till she had made a great black snake. Of course she did not get anything near three-halfpence for twelve yards, like the real "hands," but whatever she earnt went towards her Festival frocks, which she would have got in any case. Not knowing this, she was happy to deserve the pretty dresses she loved, and was least impatient of her mother's chatter when Flutter-Duck dinned into her ears how pretty she looked in them. Alas! it is to be feared Lewis was right, that Flutter-Duck was a rattle-brain indeed. And the years which brought Flutter-Duck prosperity, which emancipated her from personal participation in the sewing, and gave Rachel the little bedroom to herself, did not bring wisdom. When Flutter-Duck's felicity culminated in a maid-servant (if only one who slept out), she was like a child with a monkey-on-a-stick. She gave the servant orders merely to see her arms and legs moving. She also lay late in bed to enjoy the spectacle of the factotum making the nine o'clock coffee it had been for so many years her own duty to prepare for the "hands." How sweetly the waft of chicory came to her nostrils! At first her husband remonstrated.

"It is not beautiful," he said. "You ought to get up before the 'hands' come."

Flutter-Duck flushed resentfully. "If I bin a missis, I bin a missis," she said with dignity. It became one of her formulÆ. When the servant developed insolence, as under Flutter-Duck's fostering familiarity she did, Flutter-Duck would resume her dignity with a jerk.

"If I bin a missis," she would say, tossing her flighty head haughtily, "I bin a missis."

CHAPTER II.

A MIGRATORY BIRD.

One day, when Rachel was nineteen, there came to the workshop a handsome young man. He had been brought by a placard in the window of the chandler's shop, and was found to answer perfectly to its wants. He took his place at the work-table, and soon came to the front as a wage-earner, wielding a dexterous needle that rarely snapped, even in white fur. His name was Emanuel Lefkovitch, and his seat was next to Rachel's. For Rachel had long since entered into her career, and the beauty of her early-blossoming womanhood was bent day after day over strips of rabbit-skin, which she made into sealskin jackets. For compensation to her youth Rachel walked out on the Sabbath elegantly attired in the latest fashion. She ordered her own frocks now, having a banking account of her own, in a tin box that was hidden away in her little bedroom. Her father honourably paid her a wage as large as she would have got elsewhere—otherwise she would have gone there. Her Sabbath walks extended as far as Hyde Park, and she loved to watch the fine ladies cantering in the Row, or lolling in luxurious carriages. Sometimes she even peeped into fashionable restaurants. She became the admiring disciple of a girl who worked at a Jewish furrier's in Regent Street, and whose occidental habitat gave her a halo of aristocracy. Even on Friday nights Rachel would disappear from the sacred domesticity of the Sabbath hearth, and Flutter-Duck suspected that she went to the Cambridge Music Hall in Spitalfields. This led to dramatic scenes, for Rachel's frowardness had not decreased with age. If she had only gone out with some accredited young man, Flutter-Duck could have borne the scandal in view of the joyous prospect of becoming a grandmother. But no! Rachel tolerated no matrimonial advances, not even from the most seductive of Shadchanim, though her voluptuous figure and rosy lips marked her out for the marriage-broker's eye. Her father had grown sterner with the growth of his malady, and though at the bottom of his heart he loved and was proud of his beautiful Rachel, the words that rose to his lips were often as harsh and bitter as Flutter-Duck's own, so that the girl would withdraw sullenly into herself and hold no converse with her parents for days.

Nevertheless, there were plenty of halcyon intervals, especially in the busy season, when the extra shillings made the whole work-room brisk and happy, and the furriers gossiped of this and that, and told stories more droll than decorous. And then, too, every day was a delightfully inevitable sweep towards the Sabbath, and every Sabbath was a spoke in the great revolving wheel that brought round to them picturesque Festivals, or solemn Fasts, scarcely less enjoyable. And so there was an undercurrent of poetry below the sordid prose of daily life, and rifts in the grey fog, through which they caught glimpses of the azure vastness overarching the world. And the advent of Emanuel Lefkovitch distinctly lightened the atmosphere. His handsome face, his gay spirits, were like an influx of ozone. Rachel was perceptibly the brighter for his presence. She was gentler to everybody, even to her parents, and chatted vivaciously, and walked with an airier step! The sickly master-furrier's face lit up with pleasure as from his sofa he watched Emanuel's assiduous attentions to his girl in the way of picking up scissors and threading needles, and he frowned when Flutter-Duck hovered about the young man, chattering and monopolising his conversation.

But one fine morning, some months after Emanuel's arrival, a change came over the spirit of the scene. There was a knock at the door, and an ugly, shabby woman, in a green tartan shawl, entered. She scrutinised the room sharply, then uttered a joyful cry of "Emanuel, my love!" and threw herself upon the handsome young man with an affectionate embrace. Emanuel, flushed and paralysed, was a ludicrous figure, and the workers tittered, not unfamiliar with marital contretemps.

"Let me be," he said sullenly at last, as he untwined her dogged arms. "I tell you I won't have anything to do with you. It's no use."

"Oh no, Emanuel, love, don't say that; not after all these months?"

"Go away!" cried Emanuel hoarsely.

"Be not so obstinate," she persisted, in wheedling accents, stroking his flaming cheeks. "Kiss little Joshua and little Miriam."

Here the spectators became aware of two woebegone infants dragging at her skirts.

"Go away!" repeated Emanuel passionately, and pushed her from him with violence.

The ugly, shabby woman burst into hysterical tears.

"My own husband, dear people," she sobbed, addressing the room. "My own husband—married to me in Poland five years ago. See, I have the Cesubah!" She half drew the marriage parchment from her bosom. "And he won't live with me! Every time he runs away from me. Last time I saw him was in Liverpool, on the eve of Tabernacles. And before that I had to go and find him in Newcastle, and he promised me never to go away again—yes, you did, you know you did, Emanuel, love. And here have I been looking weeks for you at all the furriers and tailors, without bread and salt for the children, and the Board of Guardians won't believe me, and blame me for coming to London. Oh, Emanuel, love, God shall forgive you."

Her dress was dishevelled, her wig awry; big tears streamed down her cheeks.

"How can I live with an old witch like that?" asked Emanuel, in brutal self-defence.

"There are worse than me in the world," rejoined the woman meekly.

"Nee, nee," roughly interposed the master-furrier, who had risen from his sofa in the excitement of the scene. "It is not beautiful not to live with one's wife." He paused to cough. "You must not put her to shame."

"It's she who puts me to shame." Emanuel turned to Rachel, who had let her work slip to the floor, and whose face had grown white and stern, and continued deprecatingly, "I never wanted her. They caught me by a trick."

"Don't talk to me," snapped Rachel, turning her back on him.

The woman looked at her suspiciously—the girl's beauty seemed to burst upon her for the first time. "He is my husband," she repeated, and made as if she would draw out the Cesubah again.

"Nee, nee, enough!" said the master-furrier curtly. "You are wasting our time. Your husband shall live with you, or he shall not work with me."

"You have deceived us, you rogue!" put in Flutter-Duck shrilly.

"Did I ever say I was a single man?" retorted Emanuel, shrugging his shoulders.

"There! He confesses it!" cried his wife in glee. "Come, Emanuel, love," and she threw her arms round his neck, and kissed him passionately. "Do not be obstinate."

"I can't come now," he said, with sulky facetiousness. "Where are you living?"

She told him, and he said he would come when work was over.

"On your faith?" she asked, with another uneasy glance at Rachel.

"On my faith," he answered.

She moved towards the door, with her draggle-tail of infants. As she was vanishing, he called shame-facedly to the departing children,—

"Well, Joshua! Well, Miriam! Is this the way one treats a father? A nice way your mother has brought you up!"

They came back to him dubiously, with unwashed, pathetic faces, and he kissed them. Rachel bent down to pick up her rabbit-skin. Work was resumed in dead silence.

CHAPTER III.

FLIGHT.

Flutter-Duck could not resist rushing in to show the gorgeous goose she had bought from a man in the street—a most wonderful bargain. Although it was only a Wednesday, why should they not have a goose? They were at the thick of the busy season, and the winter promised to be bitter, so they could afford it.

"Nee, nee; there are enough Festivals in our religion already," grumbled her husband, who, despite his hacking cough, had been driven to the work-table by the plentifulness of work and the scarcity of "hands."

"Almost as big a goose as herself!" whispered Emanuel Lefkovitch to his circle. He had made his peace with his wife, and was again become the centre of the work-room's gaiety. "What a bargain!" he said aloud, clucking his tongue with admiration. And Flutter-Duck, consoled for her husband's criticism, scurried out again to have her bargain killed by the official slaughterer.

When she returned, doleful and indignant, with the goose still in her basket, and the news that the functionary had refused it Jewish execution, and pronounced it tripha (unclean) for some minute ritual reason, she broke off her denunciation of the vendor from a sudden perception that some graver misfortune had happened in her absence.

"Nee, nee," said Lewis, when she stopped her chatter. "Decidedly God will not have us make Festival to-day. Even you must work."

"Me?" gasped Flutter-Duck.

Then she learnt that Emanuel Lefkovitch, whom she had left so gay, had been taken with acute pains—and had had to go home. And work pressed, and Flutter-Duck must under-study him in all her spare moments. She was terribly vexed—she had arranged to go and see an old crony's daughter married in the Synagogue that afternoon, and she would have to give that up, if indeed her husband did not even expect her to give up the ball in the evening. She temporarily tethered the goose's leg to a bed-post by a long string, so that for the rest of the day the big bird waddled pompously about the floor and under the bed, unconscious to what or whom it owed its life, and blissfully unaware that it was tripha.

"Nee, nee," sniggered Lewis, as Flutter-Duck savagely kicked the cat out of her way. "Don't be alarmed, Rebbitzin won't attack it. Rebbitzin is a better judge of triphas than you."

It was another cat, but it was the same joke.

Flutter-Duck began to clean the fish with intensified viciousness. She had bought them as a substitute for the goose, and they were a constant reminder of her complex illhap. Very soon she cut her finger, and scoured the walls vainly in search of cobweb ligature. Bitter was her plaint of the servant's mismanagement; when she herself had looked after the house there had been no lack of cobwebs in the corners. Nor was this the end of Flutter-Duck's misfortunes. When, in the course of the afternoon, she sent up to Mrs. Levy on the second floor to remind her that she would be wanting her embroidered petticoat for the evening, answer came back that it was the anniversary of Mrs. Levy's mother's death, and she could not permit even her petticoat to go to a wedding. Finally, the gloves that Flutter-Duck borrowed from the chandler's wife were split at the thumbs. And so the servant was kept running to and fro, spoiling the neighbours for the greater glory of Flutter-Duck. It was only at the eleventh hour that an embroidered petticoat was obtained.

Altogether there was electricity in the air, and Emanuel was not present to divert it down the road of jocularity. The furriers stitched sullenly, with a presentiment of storm. But it held over all day, and there was hope the currents would pass harmlessly away.

With the rising of Flutter-Duck from the work-table, however, the first rumblings began. Lewis did not attempt to restrain her from her society dissipation, but he fumed inwardly throughout her toilette. More than ever he realised, as he sat coughing and bending over the ermine he was tufting with black spots, the incompatibility of this union between ant and butterfly, and occasionally his thought would shoot out in dry sarcasm. But Flutter-Duck had passed beyond the plane in which Lewis existed as her husband. All day she had talked freely, if a whit condescendingly, to her fellow-furriers, lamenting the mischances of the day; but in proportion as she began to get clean and beautiful, as the muslins of the great mirror became a frame for a gorgeous picture of a lady, Flutter-Duck grew more and more aloof from workaday interests, felt herself borne into a higher world of radiance and elegance, into a rarefied atmosphere of gentility, that froze her to statue-like frigidity.

She was not Flutter-Duck then.

And when she was quite dressed for the wedding, and had put on the earrings with the coloured stones and the crowning glory of the chignon of false plaits, stuck over with little artificial white flowers, the female neighbours came crowding into the work-room boudoir to see how she looked, and she revolved silently for their inspection like a dressmaker's figure, at most acknowledging their compliments with monosyllables. She had invited them to come and admire her appearance, but by the time they came she had grown too proud to speak to them. Even the women of whose finery she wore fragments, and who had contributed to her splendour, seemed to her poor dingy creatures, whose contact would sully her embroidered petticoat. In grotesque contrast with her peacock-like stateliness, the big tripha goose began to get lively, cackling and flapping about within its radius, as if the soul of Flutter-Duck had passed into its body.

The moment of departure had come. The cab stood at the street-door, and a composite crowd stood round the cab. In the Ghetto a cab has special significance, and Flutter-Duck would have to pass to hers through an avenue of polyglot commentators. At the last moment, adjusting her fleecy wrap over her head like any grande dame (from whom she differed only in the modesty of her high bodice and her full sleeves), Flutter-Duck discovered that there was a great rent in one part of the wrap and a great stain in another. She uttered an exclamation of dismay—this seemed to her the climax of the day's misfortunes.

"What shall I do? What shall I do?" she cried, her dignity almost melting in tears.

The by-standers made sympathetic but profitless noises.

"Oh, double it another way," jerked Rachel from the work-table. "Come here, I'll do it for you."

"Are you too lazy to come here?" replied Flutter-Duck irritably. Rachel rose and went towards her, and rearranged the wrap.

"Oh no, that won't do," complained Flutter-Duck, attitudinising before the glass. "It shows as bad as ever. Oh, what shall I do?"

"Do you know what I'll tell you?" said her husband meditatively: "Don't go!"

Flutter-Duck threw him a fiery look.

"Oh well," said Rachel, shrugging her shoulders and thrusting forward her lip contemptuously, "it'll have to do."

"No, it won't—lend me your pink one."

"I'm not going to have my pink one dirtied, too," grumbled Rachel.

"Do you hear what I say?" exclaimed Flutter-Duck, with increasing wrath. "Give me the pink wrap! When the mother says is said!" And she looked around the group of spectators, in search of sympathy with her trials and admiration for her maternal dignity.

"I can never keep anything for myself," said Rachel sullenly. "You never take care of anything."

"I took care of you," screamed Flutter-Duck, goaded beyond endurance by the thought that her neighbours were witnessing this filial disrespect. "And a fat lot of good it's done me."

"Yes, much care you take of me. You only think of enjoying yourself. It's young girls who ought to go out, not old women."

"You impudent face!" And with an irresistible impulse of savagery, a reversion to the days of MÉdiÂni, Flutter-Duck swung round her arm, and struck Rachel violently on the cheek with her white-gloved hand.