children and discharged the functions of beadle and collector. He spent a great deal of his time in avoiding being drawn into the contending factions of the congregation and in steering equally between Belcovitch and the Shalotten Shammos. The Sons only gave him fifty a year for all his trouble, but they eked it out by allowing him to be on the Committee, where on the question of a rise in the Reader's salary he was always an ineffective minority of one. His other grievance was that for the High Festivals the Sons temporarily engaged a finer voiced Reader and advertised him at raised prices to repay themselves out of the surplus congregation. Not only had Greenberg to play second fiddle on these grand occasions, but he had to iterate 'Pom' as a sort of musical accompaniment in the pauses of his rival's vocalization.
'You can't compare yourself with the Maggid' the Shalotten Shammos reminded him consolingly. 'There are hundreds of you in the market. There are several morceaux of the service which you do not sing half so well as your predecessor; your horn-blowing cannot compete with Freedman's of the Fashion Street Chevrah, nor can you read the Law as quickly and accurately as Prochintski. I have told you over and over again you confound the air of the Passover Yigdal with the New Year ditto. And then your preliminary flourish to the Confession of Sin-it goes 'Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei'' (he mimicked Greenberg's melody) 'whereas it should be 'Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi.''
'Oh no,' interrupted Belcovitch. 'All the Chazanim I've ever heard do it 'Ei, Ei, Ei.''
'You are not entitled to speak on this subject, Belcovitch,' said the Shalotten Shammos warmly. 'You are a Man-of-the-Earth. I have heard every great Chazan in Europe.'
'What was good enough for my father is good enough for me,' retorted Belcovitch. 'The Shool he took me to at home had a beautiful Chazan, and he always sang it 'Ei, Ei, Ei.''
'I don't care what you heard at home. In England every Chazan sings 'Oi, Oi, Oi.''
'We can't take our tune from England,' said Karlkammer reprovingly. 'England is a polluted country by reason of the Reformers whom we were compelled to excommunicate.'
'Do you mean to say that my father was an Epicurean?' asked Belcovitch indignantly. 'The tune was as Greenberg sings it. That there are impious Jews who pray bareheaded and sit in the synagogue side by side with the women has nothing to do with it.'
The Reformers did neither of these things, but the Ghetto to a man believed they did, and it would have been countenancing their blasphemies to pay a visit to their synagogues and see. It was an extraordinary example of a myth flourishing in the teeth of the facts, and as such should be useful to historians sifting 'the evidence of contemporary writers.'
The dispute thickened; the synagogue hummed with 'Eis' and 'Ois' not in concord.
'Shah!' said the President at last. 'Make an end, make an end!'
'You see he knows I'm right,' murmured the Shalotten Shammos to his circle.
'And if you are!' burst forth the impeached Greenberg, who had by this time thought of a retort. 'And if I do sing the Passover Yigdal instead of the New Year, have I not reason, seeing I have no bread in the house? With my salary I have Passover all the year round.'
The Chazan's sally made a good impression on his audience if not on his salary. It was felt that he had a just grievance, and the conversation was hastily shifted to the original topic.
'We mustn't forget the Maggid draws crowds here every Saturday and Sunday afternoon,' said Mendel Hyams. 'Suppose he goes over to a Chevrah that will pay him more!'
'No, he won't do that,' said another of the Committee. 'He will remember that we brought him out of Poland.'
'Yes, but we shan't have room for the audiences soon,' said Belcovitch. 'There are so many outsiders turned away every time that I think we ought to let half the applicants enjoy the first two hours of the sermon and the other half the second two hours.'
'No, no, that would be cruel,' said Karlkammer. 'He will have to give the Sunday sermons at least in a larger synagogue. My own Shool, the German, will be glad to give him facilities.'
'But what if they want to take him altogether at a higher salary?' said Mendel.
'No, I'm on the Committee, I'll see to that,' said Karlkammer reassuringly.
'Then do you think we shall tell him we can't afford to give him more?' asked Belcovitch.
There was a murmur of assent with a fainter mingling of dissent. The motion that the Maggid's application be refused was put to the vote and carried by a large majority.
It was the fate of the Maggid to be the one subject on which Belcovitch and the Shalotten Shammos agreed. They agreed as to his transcendent merits and they agreed as to the adequacy of his salary.
'But he's so weakly,' protested Mendel Hyams, who was in the minority. 'He coughs blood.'
'He ought to go to a sunny place for a week,' said Belcovitch compassionately.
'Yes, he must certainly have that,' said Karlkammer. 'Let us add as a rider that although we cannot pay him more per week, he must have a week's holiday in the country. The Shalotten Shammos shall write the letter to Rothschild.'
Rothschild was a magic name in the Ghetto; it stood next to the Almighty's as a redresser of grievances and a friend of the poor, and the Shalotten Shammos made a large part of his income by writing letters to it. He charged twopence halfpenny per letter, for his English vocabulary was larger than any other scribe's in the Ghetto, and his words were as much longer than theirs as his body. He also filled up printed application forms for Soup or Passover cakes, and had a most artistic sense of the proportion of orphans permissible to widows and a correct instinct for the plausible duration of sicknesses.
The Committee agreed nem. con. to the grant of a seaside holiday, and the Shalotten Shammos with a gratified feeling of importance waived his twopence halfpenny. He drew up a letter forthwith, not of course in the name of the Sons of the Covenant, but in the Maggid's own.
He took the magniloquent sentences to the Maggid for signature. He found the Maggid walking up and down Royal Street waiting for the verdict. The Maggid walked with a stoop that was almost a permanent bow, so that his long black beard reached well towards his baggy knees. His curved eagle nose was grown thinner, his long coat shinier, his look more haggard, his corkscrew earlocks were more matted, and when he spoke his voice was a tone more raucous. He wore his high hat-a tall cylinder that reminded one of a weather-beaten turret.
The Shalotten Shammos explained briefly what he had done.
'May thy strength increase!' said the Maggid in the Hebrew formula of gratitude.
'Nay, thine is more important,' replied the Shalotten Shammos with hilarious heartiness, and he proceeded to read the letter as they walked along together, giant and doubled-up wizard.
'But I haven't got a wife and six children,' said the Maggid, for whom one or two phrases stood out intelligible. 'My wife is dead and I never was blessed with a Kaddish.'
'It sounds better so,' said the Shalotten Shammos authoritatively. 'Preachers are expected to have heavy families dependent upon them. It would sound lies if I told the truth.'
This was an argument after the Maggid's own heart, but it did not quite convince him.
'But they will send and make inquiries,' he murmured.
'Then your family are in Poland; you send your money over there.'
'That is true,' said the Maggid feebly. 'But still it likes me not.'
'You leave it to me,' said the Shalotten Shammos impressively. 'A shamefaced man cannot learn, and a passionate man cannot teach. So said Hillel. When you are in the pulpit I listen to you;
