Children of the Ghetto

She shook her head. His face fell again. She could hardly fail to note the change.

'No, it's a stern reality,' she said. 'I wish it wasn't.'

It seemed a bold confession, but it was easy to understand. Sam had been an old school-fellow of his, and David had not thought highly of him. He was silent a moment.

'Are you not happy?' he said gently.

'Not in my marriage.'

'Sam must be a regular brute!' he cried indignantly. 'He doesn't know how to treat you. He ought to have his head punched the way he's going on with that fat thing in red.'

'Oh, don't run her down,' said Hannah, struggling to repress her emotions, which were not purely of laughter. 'She's my dearest friend.'

'They always are,' said David oracularly. 'But how came you to marry him?'

'Accident,' she said indifferently.

'Accident!' he repeated, open-eyed.

'Ah, well, it doesn't matter,' said Hannah, meditatively conveying a spoonful of trifle to her mouth. 'I shall be divorced from him to-morrow. Be careful! You nearly broke that plate.'

David stared at her, open-mouthed.

'Going to be divorced from him to-morrow?'

'Yes, is there anything odd about it?'

'Oh,' he said, after staring at her impassive face for a full minute. 'Now I'm sure you've been making fun of me all along.'

'My dear Mr. Brandon, why will you persist in making me out a liar?'

He was forced to apologize again and became such a model of perplexity and embarrassment that Hannah's gravity broke down at last and her merry peal of laughter mingled with the clatter of plates and the hubbub of voices.

'I must take pity on you and enlighten you,' she said, 'but promise me it shall go no further. It's only our own little circle that knows about it and I don't want to be the laughing-stock of the Lane.'

'Of course I will promise,' he said eagerly.

She kept his curiosity on the qui vive to amuse herself a little longer, but ended by telling him all, amid frequent exclamations of surprise.

'Well, I never!' he said when it was over. 'Fancy a religion in which only two per cent. of the people who profess it have ever heard of its laws. I suppose we're so mixed up with the English, that it never occurs to us we've got marriage laws of our own-like the Scotch. Anyhow I'm real glad and I congratulate you.'

'On what?'

'On not being really married to Sam.'

'Well, you're a nice friend of his, I must say. I don't congratulate myself, I can tell you.'

'You don't?' he said in a disappointed tone.

She shook her head silently.

'Why not?' he inquired anxiously.

'Well, to tell the truth, this forced marriage was my only chance of getting a husband who wasn't pious. Don't look so puzzled. I wasn't shocked at your wickedness-you mustn't be at mine. You know there's such a lot of religion in our house that I thought if I ever did get married I'd like a change.'

'Ha! ha! ha! So you're as the rest of us. Well, it's plucky of you to admit it.'

'Don't see it. My living doesn't depend on religion, thank Heaven. Father's a saint, I know, but he swallows everything he sees in his books just as he swallows everything mother and I put before him in his plate-and in spite of it all-' She was about to mention Levi's shortcomings but checked herself in time. She had no right to unveil anybody's soul but her own and she didn't know why she was doing that.

'But you don't mean to say your father would forbid you to marry a man you cared for, just because he wasn't froom?'

'I'm sure he would.'

'But that would be cruel.'

'He wouldn't think so. He'd think he was saving my soul, and you must remember he can't imagine any one who has been taught to see its beauty not loving the yoke of the Law. He's the best father in the world-but when religion's concerned, the best-hearted of mankind are liable to become hard as stone. You don't know my father as I do. But apart from that, I wouldn't marry a man, myself, who might hurt my father's position. I should have to keep a kosher house or look how people would talk!'

'And wouldn't you if you had your own way?'

'I don't know what I would do. It's so impossible, the idea of my having my own way. I think I should probably go in for a change, I'm so tired-so tired of this eternal ceremony. Always washing up plates and dishes. I dare say it's all for our good, but I am so tired.'

'Oh, I don't see much difficulty about Koshers. I always eat kosher meat myself when I can get it, providing it's not so beastly tough as it has a knack of being. Of course it's absurd to expect a man to go without meat when he's travelling up country, just because it hasn't been killed with a knife instead of a pole-axe. Besides, don't we know well enough that the folks who are most particular about those sort of things don't mind swindling and setting their houses on fire and all manner of abominations? I wouldn't be a Christian for the world, but I should like to see a little more common-sense introduced into our religion; it ought to be more up to date. If ever I marry, I should like my wife to be a girl who wouldn't want to keep anything but the higher parts of Judaism. Not out of laziness, mind you, but out of conviction.'

David stopped suddenly, surprised at his own sentiments, which he learned for the first time. However vaguely they might have been simmering in his brain, he could not honestly accuse himself of having ever bestowed any reflection on 'the higher parts of Judaism' or even on the religious convictions apart from the racial aspects of his future wife. Could it be that Hannah's earnestness was infecting him?

'Oh, then you would marry a Jewess!' said Hannah.

'Oh, of course,' he said in astonishment. Then as he looked at her pretty, earnest face the amusing recollection that she was married already came over him with a sort of shock, not wholly comical. There was a minute of silence, each pursuing a separate train of thought. Then David wound up, as if there had been no break, with an elliptical, 'wouldn't you?'

Hannah shrugged her shoulders and elevated her eyebrows in a gesture that lacked her usual grace.

'Not if I had only to please myself,' she added.

'Oh, come! Don't say that,' he said anxiously. 'I don't believe mixed marriages are a success. Really, I don't. Besides, look at the scandal!'

Again she shrugged her shoulders, defiantly this time.

'I don't suppose I shall ever get married,' she said. 'I never could marry a man father would approve of, so that a Christian would be no worse than an educated Jew.'

David did not quite grasp the sentence; he was trying to, when Sam and Leah passed them. Sam winked in a friendly if not very refined manner.

'I see you two are getting on all right.' he said.

'Good gracious!' said Hannah, starting up with a blush. 'Everybody's going back. They will think us greedy. What a pair of fools we are to have got into such serious conversation at a ball.'

'Was it serious?' said David with a retrospective air. 'Well, I never enjoyed a conversation so much in my life.'

'You mean the supper,' Hannah said lightly.

'Well, both. It's your fault that we don't behave more appropriately.'

'How do you mean?'

'You won't dance.'

'Do you want to?'

'Rather.'

'I thought you were afraid of all the swells.'