Kitabı oku: «The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies», sayfa 18

"Thou forgettest our brother, the Green Prince," said the Blue Prince in astonished reproof.

"Bah! he hath eyes for naught but the odd ortolans and oysters I sacrificed that he might gorge himself withal, while I spied out thy secret. He shall be told that I returned to exchange my car for thy pigeon even as I exchanged my boat for his car. Come, thine oath or thou diest." And a jewelled scimitar shimmered in the starlight.

The Blue Prince reflected that though life without love was hardly worth living, death was quite useless. So he swore and went in to supper. When he found that the Green Prince had not spared even a baked chestnut before he fell asleep, he swore again. And on the morrow when the Princes approached the Tower of Telifonia, with its flashing "Johnny Noddy," they met a courier from the King, who, having informed himself of the Black Prince's success, ran ahead with the rumour thereof. And lo! when the Princes passed through the city gate they found the whole population abroad clad in all their bravery, and flags flying and bells ringing and roses showering from the balconies, and merry music swelling in all the streets for joy of the prospect of the Sea Serpent's absence. And when the new moon rose, the three Princes, escorted by flute-players, hied them to the Presence Chamber, and the King embraced his sons, and the Black Prince stood forward and explained that if a Prince were married in the ninth moon it would prevent the monster's annual visit. Then the King fell upon the Black Prince's neck and wept and said, "My son! my son! my pet! my baby! my tootsicums! my popsy-wopsy!"

And then, recovering himself, and addressing the courtiers, he said: "The gods have enabled me to discover my youngest son. If they will only now continue as propitious, so that I may discover the elder of the other two, I shall die not all unhappy."

But the Black Prince could repress his astonishment no longer. "Am I dreaming, sire?" he cried. "Surely I have proved myself the eldest, not the youngest!"

"Thou forgettest that thou hast come off successful," replied the King in astonished reproof. "Or art thou so ignorant of history or of the sacred narratives handed down to us by our ancestors that thou art unaware that when three brothers set out on the same quest, it is always the youngest brother that emerges triumphant? Such is the will of the gods. Cease, therefore, thy blasphemous talk, lest they overhear thee and be put out."

A low, ominous murmur from the courtiers emphasised the King's warning.

"But the Princess – she at least is mine," protested the unhappy Prince. "We love each other – we are engaged."

"Thou forgettest she can only marry the heir," replied the King in astonished reproof. "Wouldst thou have us repudiate our solemn treaty?"

"But I wasn't really the first to hit on the idea at all!" cried the Black Prince desperately. "Ask the Blue Prince! he never telleth untruth."

"Thou forgettest I have taken an oath of silence on the matter," replied the Blue Prince in astonished reproof. "The Black Prince it was that first hit on the idea," volunteered the Green Prince. "He exchanged his boat for the car and the car for the pigeon."

So the three Princes were dismissed, while the King took counsel with the magicians and the wise men who never mean what they say. And the Court Chamberlain, wearing the orchid of office in his buttonhole, was sent to interview the Princess, and returned saying that she refused to marry any one but the proprietor of the pigeon, and that she still had his letters as evidence in case of his marrying anyone else.

"Bah!" said the King, "she shall obey the treaty. Six feet of parchment are not to be put aside for the whim of a girl five foot eight. The only real difficulty remaining is to decide whether the Blue Prince or the Green Prince is the elder. Let me see – what was it the Oracle said? Perhaps it will be clearer now: —

"'The eldest is he that the Princess shall wed.'

"No, it still seems merely to avoid stating anything new."

"Pardon me, sire," replied the Chief Magician; "it seems perfectly plain now. Obviously, thou art to let the Princess choose her husband, and the Oracle guarantees that, other things being equal, she shall select the eldest. If thou hadst let her have the pick from among the three, she would have selected the one with whom she was in love – the Black Prince to wit, and that would have interfered with the Oracle's arrangements. But now that we know with whom she is in love, we can remove that one, and then, there being no reason why she should choose the Green Prince rather than the Blue Prince, the deities of the realm undertake to inspire her to go by age only."

"Thou hast spoken well," said the King. "Let the Princess of Paphlagonia be brought, and let the two Princes return."

So after a space the beautiful Princess, preceded by trumpeters, was conducted to the Palace, blinking her eyes at the unaccustomed splendour of the lights. And the King and all the courtiers blinked their eyes, dazzled by her loveliness. She was clad in white samite, and on her shoulder was perched a pet pigeon. The King sat in his moiré robes on the old gold throne, and the Blue Prince stood on his right hand, and the Green Prince on his left, the Black Prince as the youngest having been sent to bed early. The Princess courtesied three times, the third time so low that the pigeon was flustered, and flew off her shoulder, and, after circling about, alighted on the head of the Blue Prince.

"It is the Crown," said the Chief Magician, in an awestruck voice. Then the Princess's eyes looked around in search of the pigeon, and when they lighted on the Prince's head they kindled as the grey sea kindles at sunrise.

An answering radiance shone in the Blue Prince's eyes, as, taking the pigeon that nestled in his hair, he let it fly towards the Princess. But the Princess, her bosom heaving as if another pigeon fluttered beneath the white samite, caught it and set it free again, and again it made for the Blue Prince.

Three times the bird sped to and fro. Then the Princess raised her humid eyes heavenward, and from her sweet lips rippled like music the verse: —

"Last night I watched its final flicker die."

And the Blue Prince answered: —

"Now greet our moon of honey in the sky."

Half fainting with rapture the Princess fell into his arms, and from all sides of the great hall arose the cries, "The Heir! The Heir! Long live our future King! The eldest-born! The Oracle's fulfilled!"

Such was the origin of lawn tennis, which began with people tossing pigeons to each other in imitation of the Prince and Princess in the Palace Hall. And this is why love plays so great a part in the game, and that is how the match was arranged between the Blue Prince and the Princess of Paphlagonia.

A Successful Operation

Robert came home, anxious and perturbed. For the first time since his return from their honeymoon he crossed the threshold of the tiny house without a grateful sense of blessedness.

"What is it, Robert?" panted Mary, her sweet lips cold from his perfunctory kiss.

"He is going blind," he said in low tones.

"Not your father!" she murmured, dazed.

"Yes, my father! I thought it was nothing, or rather I scarcely thought about it at all. The doctor at the Eye Hospital merely asked him to bring some one with him next time; naturally he came to me." There was a touch of bitterness about the final phrase.

"Oh, how terrible!" said Mary. Her pretty face looked almost wan.

"I don't see that you're called upon to distress yourself so much, dear," said Robert, a little resentfully. "He hasn't even been a friend to you."

"Oh, Robert! how can you think of all that now? If he did try to keep you from marrying a penniless, friendless girl, if he did force you to work long years for me, was it not all for the best? Now that his fortune has been swept away, where would you be without money or occupation?"

"Where would Providence be without its women-defenders?" murmured Robert. "You don't understand finance, dear. He might easily have provided for me long before the crash came."

"Never mind, Robert. Are we not all the happier for having waited for each other?" And in the spiritual ecstasy of her glance he forgot for a while his latest trouble.

Robert's father lived in a little room on a small allowance made him by his outcast son. Broken by age and misfortune, he pottered about chess-rooms and debating forums, garrulous and dogmatic, and given to tippling. But now the consciousness of his coming infirmity crushed him, and he sat for days on his bed brooding, waiting in terror for the darkness, and glad when day after day ended only in the shadows of eve. Sometimes, instead of the dreaded darkness, sunlight came. That was when Mary dropped in to cheer him up, and to repeat to him that the hospital took a most hopeful view of his case, was only waiting for the darkness to be thickest to bring back the dawn. It took four months before the light faded utterly, and then another month before the film was opaque enough to allow the cataract to be couched. The old man was to go into the hospital for the operation. Robert hired a lad to be with him during the month of waiting, and sometimes sat with him in the evenings, after business, and now and then the landlady looked in and told him her troubles, and the attendant was faithful and went out frequently to buy him gin. But it was only Mary who could really soothe him now, for the poor old creature's soul groped blindly amid new apprehensions – a nervous dread of the chloroforming, the puncturing, the strange sounds of voices of the great blank hospital, where he felt confusedly he would be lost in an ocean of unfathomable night, incapable even of divining, from past experience, the walls about him or the ceiling over his head, and withal a paralysing foreboding that the operation would be a failure, that he would live out the rest of his days with the earth prematurely over his eyes.

"I am very glad to see you, my dear," he would say when Mary came, and then he fell a-maundering self-pitifully.

Mary went home one day and said, "Robert, dear, I have been thinking."

"Yes, my pet," he said encouragingly, for she looked timid and hesitant.

"Couldn't we have the operation performed here?"

He was startled; protested, pointed out the impossibility. But she had answers for all his objections. They could give up their own bedroom for a fortnight – it would only be a fortnight or three weeks at most – turn their sitting-room into a bedroom for themselves. What if infinite care would be necessary in regulating the "dark room," surely they could be as careful as the indifferent hospital nurses if they were only told what to do, and as for the trouble, that wasn't worth considering.

"But you forget, my foolish little girl," he said at last, "if he comes here we shall have to pay the expenses of the operation ourselves."

"Well, would that be much?" she asked innocently.

"Only fifty guineas or so, I should think," he replied crushingly. "What with the operating fee, and the nurse, and the subsequent medical attendance."

But Mary was not altogether crushed. "It wouldn't be all our savings," she murmured.

"Are you forgetting what we shall be needing our savings for?" he said with gentle reproach, as he stroked her soft hair.

She blushed angelically. "No, but surely there will be enough left and – and I shall be making all his things myself – and by that time we shall have put by a little more."

In the end she conquered. The old man, to whom no faintest glimmer now penetrated, was installed in the best bedroom, which was darkened by double blinds and strips of cloth over every chink and a screen before the door; and a nurse sat on guard lest any ray or twinkle should find its way into the pitchy gloom. The great specialist came with two assistants, and departed in an odour of chloroform, conscious of another dexterous deed, to return only when the critical moment of raising the bandage should have arrived. During the fortnight of suspense an assistant replaced him, and the old man lay quiet and hopeful, rousing himself to talk dogmatically to his visitors. Mary gave him such time as she could spare from household duties, and he always kissed her on the forehead (so that his bandage just grazed her hair), remarking he was very glad to see her. It was a strange experience, these conversations carried on in absolute darkness, and they gave her a feeling of kinship with the blind. She discovered that smiles were futile, and that laughter alone availed in this uncanny intercourse. For compensation, her face could wear an anxious expression without alarming the patient. But it rarely did, for her spirits mounted with his. Before the operation she had been terribly anxious, wondering at the last moment if it would not have been performed more safely at the hospital, and ready to take upon her shoulders the responsibility for a failure. But as day after day went by, and all seemed going well, her thoughts veered round. She felt sure they would not have been so careful at the hospital. It was owing to this new confidence that one fatal night, carrying her candle, she walked mechanically into her bedroom, forgetting it was not hers. The nurse sprang up instantly, rushed forward, and blew out the light. Mary screamed, the screen fell with a clatter, the blind old man awoke and shrieked nervously – it was a terrible moment.

After that Mary went through agonies of apprehension and remorse. Fortunately the end of the operation was very near now. In a day or two the great specialist came to remove the bandage, while the nurse carefully admitted a feeble illumination. If the patient could see now, the rest was a mere matter of time, of cautious gradation of light in the sick chamber, so that there might be no relapse. Mary dared not remain in the room at the instant of supreme crisis; she lingered outside, overwrought. Slowly, with infinite solicitude, the bandage was raised.

"Can you see anything?" burst from Robert's lips.

"Yes, but what makes the window look red?" grumbled the old man.

"I congratulate you," said the great specialist in loud, hearty accents.

"Thank God!" sobbed Mary's voice outside.

When her child was born it was blind.

Flutter-Duck
A GHETTO GROTESQUE

CHAPTER I
FLUTTER-DUCK IN FEATHER

 
"So sitting, served by man and maid,
She felt her heart grow prouder."
 

– Tennyson: The Goose.

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."