"Do you know the story?" he went on, encouraged by Simcha's smiling face, "of the old Reb and the Havdolah? His wife left town for a few days and when she returned the Reb took out a bottle of wine, poured some into the consecration cup and began to recite the blessing. 'What art thou doing?' demanded his wife in amaze.' I am making Havdolah,' replied the Reb. 'But it is not the conclusion of a festival to-night,' she said. 'Oh, yes, it is,' he answered. 'My Festival's over. You've come back.'"
The Reb laughed so much over this story that Simcha's brow grew as the solid Egyptian darkness, and Pinchas perceived he had made a mistake.
"But listen to the end," he said with a creditable impromptu. "The wife said-'No, you're mistaken. Your Festival's only beginning. You get no supper. It's the commencement of the Day of Atonement.'"
Simcha's brow cleared and the Reb laughed heartily.
"But I don't seethe point, father," said Levi.
"Point! Listen, my son. First of all he was to have a Day of Atonement, beginning with no supper, for his sin of rudeness to his faithful wife. Secondly, dost thou not know that with us the Day of Atonement is called a festival, because we rejoice at the Creator's goodness in giving us the privilege of fasting? That's it, Pinchas, isn't it?"
"Yes, that's the point of the story, and I think the Rebbitzin had the best of it, eh?"
"Rebbitzins always have the last word," said the Reb. "But did I tell you the story of the woman who asked me a question the other day? She brought me a fowl in the morning and said that in cutting open the gizzard she had found a rusty pin which the fowl must have swallowed. She wanted to know whether the fowl might be eaten. It was a very difficult point, for how could you tell whether the pin had in any way contributed to the fowl's death? I searched the Shass and a heap of Shaalotku-Tshuvos. I went and consulted the Maggid and Sugarman the Shadchan and Mr. Karlkammer, and at last we decided that the fowl was tripha and could not be eaten. So the same evening I sent for the woman, and when I told her of our decision she burst into tears and wrung her hands. 'Do not grieve so,' I said, taking compassion upon her, 'I will buy thee another fowl.' But she wept on, uncomforted. 'O woe! woe!' she cried. 'We ate it all up yesterday.'"
Pinchas was convulsed with laughter. Recovering himself, he lit his half-smoked cigar without asking leave.
"I thought it would turn out differently," he said. "Like that story of the peacock. A man had one presented to him, and as this is such rare diet he went to the Reb to ask if it was kosher. The Rabbi said 'no' and confiscated the peacock. Later on the man heard that the Rabbi had given a banquet at which his peacock was the crowning dish. He went to his Rabbi and reproached him. 'I may eat it,' replied the Rabbi, 'because my father considers it permitted and we may always go by what some eminent Son of the Law decides. But you unfortunately came to me for an opinion, and the permissibility of peacock is a point on which I have always disagreed with my father.'"
Hannah seemed to find peculiar enjoyment in the story.
"Anyhow," concluded Pinchas, "you have a more pious flock than the Rabbi of my native place, who, one day, announced to his congregation that he was going to resign. Startled, they sent to him a delegate, who asked, in the name of the congregation, why he was leaving them. 'Because,' answered the Rabbi, 'this is the first question any one has ever asked me!'"
"Tell Mr. Pinchas your repartee about the donkey," said Hannah, smiling.
"Oh, no, it's not worth while," said the Reb.
"Thou art always so backward with thine own," cried the Rebbitzin warmly. "Last Purim an impudent of face sent my husband a donkey made of sugar. My husband had a Rabbi baked in gingerbread and sent it in exchange to the donor, with the inscription 'A Rabbi sends a Rabbi.'"
Reb Shemuel laughed heartily, hearing this afresh at the lips of his wife. But Pinchas was bent double like a convulsive note of interrogation.
The clock on the mantelshelf began to strike nine. Levi jumped to his feet.
"I shall be late for school!" he cried, making for the door.
"Stop! stop!" shouted his father. "Thou hast not yet said grace."
"Oh, yes, I have, father. While you were all telling stories I was benshing quietly to myself."
"Is Saul also among the prophets, is Levi also among the story-tellers?" murmured Pinchas to himself. Aloud he said: "The child speaks truth; I saw his lips moving."
Levi gave the poet a grateful look, snatched up his satchel and ran off to No. 1 Royal Street. Pinchas followed him soon, inwardly upbraiding Reb Shemuel for meanness. He had only as yet had his breakfast for his book. Perhaps it was Simcha's presence that was to blame. She was the Reb's right hand and he did not care to let her know what his left was doing.
He retired to his study when Pinchas departed, and the Rebbitzin clattered about with a besom.
The study was a large square room lined with book-shelves and hung with portraits of the great continental Rabbis. The books were bibliographical monsters to which the Family Bibles of the Christian are mere pocket-books. They were all printed purely with the consonants, the vowels being divined grammatically or known by heart. In each there was an island of text in a sea of commentary, itself lost in an ocean of super-commentary that was bordered by a continent of super-super-commentary. Reb Shemuel knew many of these immense folios-with all their tortuous windings of argument and anecdote-much as the child knows the village it was born in, the crooked by-ways and the field paths. Such and such a Rabbi gave such and such an opinion on such and such a line from the bottom of such and such a page-his memory of it was a visual picture. And just as the child does not connect its native village with the broader world without, does not trace its streets and turnings till they lead to the great towns, does not inquire as to its origins and its history, does not view it in relation to other villages, to the country, to the continent, to the world, but loves it for itself and in itself, so Reb Shemuel regarded and reverenced and loved these gigantic pages with their serried battalions of varied type. They were facts-absolute as the globe itself-regions of wisdom, perfect and self-sufficing. A little obscure here and there, perhaps, and in need of amplification or explication for inferior intellects-a half-finished manuscript commentary on one of the super-commentaries, to be called "The Garden of Lilies," was lying open on Reb Shemuel's own desk-but yet the only true encyclopaedia of things terrestrial and divine. And, indeed, they were wonderful books. It was as difficult to say what was not in them as what was. Through them the old Rabbi held communion with his God whom he loved with all his heart and soul and thought of as a genial Father, watching tenderly over His froward children and chastising them because He loved them. Generations of saints and scholars linked Reb Shemuel with the marvels of Sinai. The infinite network of ceremonial never hampered his soul; it was his joyous privilege to obey his Father in all things and like the king who offered to reward the man who invented a new pleasure, he was ready to embrace the sage who could deduce a new commandment. He rose at four every morning to study, and snatched every odd moment he could during the day. Rabbi Meir, that ancient ethical teacher, wrote: "Whosoever labors in the Torah for its own sake, the whole world is indebted to him; he is called friend, beloved, a lover of the All-present, a lover of mankind; it clothes him in meekness and reverence; it fits him to become just, pious, upright and faithful; he becomes modest, long-suffering and forgiving of insult."
Reb Shemuel would have been scandalized if any one had applied these words to him.
At about eleven o'clock Hannah came into the room, an open letter in her hand.
"Father," she said, "I have just had a letter from Samuel Levine."
"Your husband?" he said, looking up with a smile.
"My husband," she replied, with a fainter smile.
"And what does he say?"
"It isn't a very serious letter; he only wants to reassure me that he is coming back by Sunday week to be divorced."
"All right; tell him it shall be done at cost price," he said, with the foreign a
ccent that made him somehow seem more lovable to his daughter when he spoke English. "He shall only be charged for the scribe."
"He'll take that for granted," Hannah replied. "Fathers are expected to do these little things for their own children. But how much nicer it would be if you could give me the Gett yourself."
"I would marry you with pleasure," said Reb Shemuel, "but divorce is another matter. The Din has too much regard for a father's feelings to allow that."
"And you really think I am Sam Levine's wife?"
"How many times shall I tell you? Some authorities do take the intention into account, but the letter of the law is clearly against you. It is far safer to be formally divorced."
"Then if he were to die-"
"Save us and grant us peace," interrupted the Reb in horror.
"I should be his widow."
"Yes, I suppose you would. But what Narrischkeit! Why should he die? It isn't as if you were really married to him," said the Reb, his eye twinkling.
"But isn't it all absurd, father?"
"Do not talk so," said Reb Shemuel, resuming his gravity. "Is it absurd that you should be scorched if you play with fire?"
Hannah did not reply to the question.
"You never told me how you got on at Manchester," she said. "Did you settle the dispute satisfactorily?"
"Oh, yes," said the Reb; "but it was very difficult. Both parties were so envenomed, and it seems that the feud has been going on in the congregation ever since the Day of Atonement, when the minister refused to blow the Shofar three minutes too early, as the President requested. The Treasurer sided with the minister, and there has almost been a split."
"The sounding of the New Year trumpet seems often to be the signal for war," said Hannah, sarcastically.
"It is so," said the Reb, sadly.
"And how did you repair the breach?"
"Just by laughing at both sides. They would have turned a deaf ear to reasoning. I told them that Midrash about Jacob's journey to Laban."
"What is that?"
"Oh, it's an amplification of the Biblical narrative. The verse in Genesis says that he lighted on the place, and he put up there for the night because the sun had set, and he took of the stones of the place and he made them into pillows. But later on it says that he rose up in the morning and he took the stone which he had put as his pillows. Now what is the explanation?" Reb Shemuel's tone became momently more sing-song: "In the night the stones quarrelled for the honor of supporting the Patriarch's head, and so by a miracle they were turned into one stone to satisfy them all. 'Now you remember that when Jacob arose in the morning he said: 'How fearful is this place; this is none other than the House of God.' So I said to the wranglers: 'Why did Jacob say that? He said it because his rest had been so disturbed by the quarrelling stones that it reminded him of the House of God-the Synagogue.' I pointed out how much better it would be if they ceased their quarrellings and became one stone. And so I made peace again in the Kehillah."
"Till next year," said Hannah, laughing. "But, father, I have often wondered why they allow the ram's horn in the service. I thought all musical instruments were forbidden."
"It is not a musical instrument-in practice," said the Reb, with evasive facetiousness. And, indeed, the performers were nearly always incompetent, marring the solemnity of great moments by asthmatic wheezings and thin far-away tootlings.
"But it would be if we had trained trumpeters," persisted Hannah, smiling.
"If you really want the explanation, it is that since the fall of the second Temple we have dropped out of our worship all musical instruments connected with the old Temple worship, especially such as have become associated with Christianity. But the ram's horn on the New Year is an institution older than the Temple, and specially enjoined in the Bible."
"But surely there is something spiritualizing about an organ."
For reply the Reb pinched her ear. "Ah, you are a sad Epikouros " he said, half seriously. "If you loved God you would not want an organ to take your thoughts to heaven."
He released her ear and took up his pen, humming with unction a synagogue air full of joyous flourishes.
Hannah turned to go, then turned back.
"Father," she said nervously, blushing a little, "who was that you said you had in your eye?"
"Oh, nobody in particular," said the Reb, equally embarrassed and avoiding meeting her eye, as if to conceal the person in his.
"But you must have meant something by it," she said gravely. "You know I'm not going to be married off to please other people."
The Reb wriggled uncomfortably in his chair. "It was only a thought-an idea. If it does not come to you, too, it shall be nothing. I didn't mean anything serious-really, my dear, I didn't. To tell you the truth," he finished suddenly with a frank, heavenly smile, "the person I had mainly in my eye when I spoke was your mother."
This time his eye met hers, and they smiled at each other with the consciousness of the humors of the situation. The Rebbitzin's broom was heard banging viciously in the passage. Hannah bent down and kissed the ample forehead beneath the black skull-cap.
"Mr. Levine also writes insisting that I must go to the Purim ball with him and Leah," she said, glancing at the letter.
"A husband's wishes must be obeyed," answered the Reb.
"No, I will treat him as if he were really my husband," retorted Hannah. "I will have my own way: I shan't go."
The door was thrown open suddenly.
"Oh yes thou wilt," said the Rebbitzin. "Thou art not going to bury thyself alive."
CHAPTER VIII. ESTHER AND HER CHILDREN.
Esther Ansell did not welcome Levi Jacobs warmly. She had just cleared away the breakfast things and was looking forward to a glorious day's reading, and the advent of a visitor did not gratify her. And yet Levi Jacobs was a good-looking boy with brown hair and eyes, a dark glowing complexion and ruddy lips-a sort of reduced masculine edition of Hannah.
"I've come to play I-spy-I, Solomon," he said when he entered "My, don't you live high up!"
"I thought you had to go to school," Solomon observed with a stare.
"Ours isn't a board school," Levi explained. "You might introduce a fellow to your sister."
"Garn! You know Esther right enough," said Solomon and began to whistle carelessly.
"How are you, Esther?" said Levi awkwardly.
"I'm very well, thank you," said Esther, looking up from a little brown-covered book and looking down at it again.
She was crouching on the fender trying to get some warmth at the little fire extracted from Reb Shemuel's half-crown. December continued gray; the room was dim and a spurt of flame played on her pale earnest face. It was a face that never lost a certain ardency of color even at its palest: the hair was dark and abundant, the eyes were large and thoughtful, the nose slightly aquiline and the whole cast of the features betrayed the Polish origin. The forehead was rather low. Esther had nice teeth which accident had preserved white. It was an arrestive rather than a beautiful face, though charming enough when she smiled. If the grace and candor of childhood could have been disengaged from the face, it would have been easier to say whether it was absolutely pretty. It came nearer being so on Sabbaths and holidays when scholastic supervision was removed and the hair was free to fall loosely about the shoulders instead of being screwed up into the pendulous plait so dear to the educational eye. Esther could have earned a penny quite easily by sacrificing her tresses and going about with close-cropped head like a boy, for her teacher never failed thus to reward the shorn, but in the darkest hours of hunger she held on to her hair as her mother had done before her. The prospects of Esther's post-nuptial wig were not brilliant. She was not tall for a girl who is getting on for twelve; but some little girls shoot up suddenly and there was considerable room for hope.
Sarah and Isaac were romping noisily about and under the beds; Rachel was at the table, knitting a scarf for Solomon; the grandmother pored over a bulky enchiridion for pious
women, written in jargon. Moses was out in search of work. No one took any notice of the visitor.
"What's that you're reading?" he asked Esther politely.
"Oh nothing," said Esther with a start, closing the book as if fearful he might want to look over her shoulder.
"I don't see the fun of reading books out of school," said Levi.
"Oh, but we don't read school books," said Solomon defensively.
"I don't care. It's stupid."
"At that rate you could never read books when you're grown up," said Esther contemptuously.
"No, of course not," admitted Levi. "Otherwise where would be the fun of being grown up? After I leave school I don't intend to open a book."
"No? Perhaps you'll open a shop," said Solomon.
"What will you do when it rains?" asked Esther crushingly.
"I shall smoke," replied Levi loftily.
"Yes, but suppose it's Shabbos," swiftly rejoined Esther.
Levi was nonplussed. "Well, it can't rain all day and there are only fifty-two Shabbosim in the year," he said lamely. "A man can always do something."
"I think there's more pleasure in reading than in doing something," remarked Esther.
"Yes, you're a girl," Levi reminded her, "and girls are expected to stay indoors. Look at my sister Hannah. She reads, too. But a man can be out doing what he pleases, eh, Solomon?"
"Yes, of course we've got the best of it," said Solomon. "The Prayer-book shows that. Don't I say every morning 'Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hast not made me a woman'?"
"I don't know whether you do say it. You certainly have got to," said Esther witheringly.
"'Sh," said Solomon, winking in the direction of the grandmother.
"It doesn't matter," said Esther calmly. "She can't understand what I'm saying."
"I don't know," said Solomon dubiously. "She sometimes catches more than you bargain for."
"And then, you catch more than you bargain for," said Rachel, looking up roguishly from her knitting.
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