Children of the Ghetto

Sambatyon, father, which refuses to flow on Shabbos.'

He spoke Yiddish, grown a child again. Moses's face lit up with joy. His eldest born had returned to intelligibility. There was hope still then. A sudden burst of sunshine flooded the room. In London the sun would not break through the clouds for some hours. Moses leaned over the pillow, his face working with blended emotions. Me let a hot tear fall on his boy's upturned face.

'Hush, hush, my little Benjamin, don't cry,' said Benjamin, and began to sing in his mothers jargon:

'Sleep, little father, sleep,

Thy father shall be a Rav,

Thy mother shall bring little apples,

Blessings on thy little head,'

Moses saw his dead Gittel lulling his boy to sleep. Blinded by his tears, he did not see that they were falling thick upon the little white face.

'Nay, dry thy tears, I tell thee, my little Benjamin,' said Benjamin, in tones more tender and soothing, and launched into the strange wailing melody:

'Alas, woe is me!

How wretched to be

Driven away and banished,

Yet so young, from thee.'

'And Joseph's mother called to him from the grave: Be comforted, my son, a great future shall be thine.'

'The end is near,' old Four-Eyes whispered to the father in jargon. Moses trembled from head to foot. 'My poor lamb! My poor Benjamin,' he wailed. 'I thought thou wouldst say Kaddish after me, not I for thee.' Then he began to recite quietly the Hebrew prayers. The hat he should have removed was appropriate enough now.

Benjamin sat up excitedly in bed: 'There's mother, Esther!' he cried in English. 'Coming back with my coat. But what's the use of it now?'

His head fell back again. Presently a look of yearning came over the face so full of boyish beauty. 'Esther,' he said. 'Wouldn't you like to be in the green country to-day? Look how the sun shines.'

It shone, indeed, with deceptive warmth, bathing in gold the green country that stretched beyond, and dazzling the eyes of the dying boy. The birds twittered outside the window. 'Esther!' he said, wistfully, 'do you think there'll be another funeral soon?'.

The matron burst into tears and turned away.

'Benjamin,' cried the father, frantically, thinking the end had come, 'say the Shemang.'

The boy stared at him, a clearer look in his eyes.

'Say the Shemang!' said Moses peremptorily. The word Shemang, the old authoritative tone, penetrated the consciousness of the dying boy.

'Yes, father, I was just going to,' he grumbled, submissively.

They repeated the last declaration of the dying Israelite together. It was in Hebrew. 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.' Both understood that.

Benjamin lingered on a few more minutes, and died in a painless torpor.

'He is dead,' said the doctor.

'Blessed be the true Judge,' said Moses. He rent his coat, and closed the staring eyes. Then he went to the toilet table and turned the looking-glass to the wall, and opened the window and emptied the jug of water upon the green sunlit grass.

CHAPTER XXI. THE JARGON PLAYERS.

'No, don't stop me, Pinchas,' said Gabriel Hamburg. 'I'm packing up, and I shall spend my Passover in Stockholm. The Chief Rabbi there has discovered a manuscript which I am anxious to see, and as I have saved up a little money I shall speed thither.'

'Ah, he pays well, that boy-fool, Raphael Leon,' said Pinchas, emitting a lazy ring of smoke.

'What do you mean?' cried Gabriel, flushing angrily. 'Do you mean, perhaps, that you have been getting money out of him?'

'Precisely. That is what I do mean,' said the poet naively. 'What else?'

'Well, don't let me hear you call him a fool. He is one to send you money, but then it is for others to call him so. That boy will be a great man in Israel. The son of rich English Jews-a Harrow-boy, yet he already writes Hebrew almost grammatically.'

Pinchas was aware of this fact: had he not written to the lad (in response to a crude Hebrew eulogium and a crisp Bank of England note): 'I and thou are the only two people in England who write the Holy Tongue grammatically.'

He replied now: 'It is true; soon he will vie with me and you.'

The old scholar took snuff impatiently. The humors of Pinchas were beginning to pall upon him.

'Good-bye,' he said again.

'No, wait, yet a little,' said Pinchas, buttonholing him resolutely. 'I want to show you my acrostic on Simon Wolf; ah! I will shoot him, the miserable labor-leader, the wretch who embezzles the money of the Socialist fools who trust him. Aha! it will sting like Juvenal, that acrostic.'

'I haven't time,' said the gentle savant, beginning to lose his temper.

'Well, have I time? I have to compose a three-act comedy by to-morrow at noon. I expect I shall have to sit up all night to get it done in time.' Then, anxious to complete the conciliation of the old snuff-and-pepper-box, as he mentally christened him for his next acrostic, he added: 'If there is anything in this manuscript that you cannot decipher or understand, a letter to me, care of Reb Shemuel, will always find me. Somehow I have a special genius for filling up lacunae in manuscripts. You remember the famous discovery that I made by rewriting the six lines torn out of the first page of that Midrash I discovered in Cyprus.'

'Yes, those six lines proved it thoroughly,' sneered the savant.

'Aha! You see!' said the poet, a gratified smile pervading his dusky features. 'But I must tell you of this comedy-it will be a satirical picture (in the style of Moliere, only sharper) of Anglo-Jewish Society. The Rev. Elkan Benjamin, with his four mistresses, they will all be there, and Gideon, the Man-of-the-Earth, M.P.,-ah, it will be terrible. If I could only get them to see it performed, they should have free passes.'

'No, shoot them first; it would be more merciful. But where is this comedy to be played?' asked Hamburg curiously.

'At the Jargon Theatre, the great theatre in Prince's Street, the only real national theatre in England. The English stage-Drury Lane-pooh! It is not in harmony with the people; it does not express them.'

Hamburg could not help smiling. He knew the wretched little hall, since tragically famous for a massacre of innocents, victims to the fatal cry of fire-more deadly than fiercest flame.

'But how will your audience understand it?' he asked.

'Aha!' said the poet, laying his finger on his nose and grinning. 'They will understand. They know the corruptions of our society. All this conspiracy to crush me, to hound me out of England so that ignoramuses may prosper and hypocrites wax fat-do you think it is not the talk of the Ghetto? What! Shall it be the talk of Berlin, of Constantinople, of Mogadore, of Jerusalem, of Paris, and here it shall not be known? Besides, the leading actress will speak a prologue. Ah! she is beautiful, beautiful as Lilith, as the Queen of Sheba, as Cleopatra! And how she acts! She and Rachel-both Jewesses! Think of it! Ah, we are a great people. If I could tell you the secrets of her eyes as she looks at me-but no, you are dry as dust, a creature of prose! And there will be an orchestra, too, for Pesach Weingott has promised to play the overture on his fiddle. How he stirs the soul! It is like David playing before Saul.'

'Yes, but it won't be javelins the people will throw,' murmured Hamburg, adding aloud: 'I suppose you have written the music of this overture.'