a cabalistic significance both without and within, yet in the compartment she was more private than she could have hoped. Even in this debased society there were apparently instincts of delicacy! When the tinkle of the bell had ceased, her nostrils became gradually and oppressively aware of an odour, emerging permeatingly from some unseen point, of boiling fat tinctured with the aroma of onions. With a sudden faintness at the greasy, nauseating odour, she closed her eyes, and when she opened them a moment later, a short, squat man magically confronted her, having issued unseen, like a genie, from behind the heavy opaque cloud of vapour that filled the inner shop. He had a long, square beard, iron grey and slightly curling, bushy eyebrows of the same colour and texture, beneath which bright, beady eyes twinkled like a bird's; his hands and shoulders moved deferentially, but these black pellets of eyes never left Mrs. Brodie's face. He was a Polish Jew whose settlement in Levenford could be adduced only to his racial proclivity for courting adversity and who, failing to eke out an existence by usury in the hard soil of the Borough, was reduced to merely subsisting so so it seemed by the buying and selling of rags. Being mild and inoffensive, he did not resent the abusive epithets which greeted him as, shouting, 'Any rag anybone! any-bottle to-day!', he drove his donkey care upon his rounds; and he made no complaints except to bewail, to such as would hear him, the absence of a synagogue in the town.
'Yeth?' he now lisped to Mrs. Brodie.
'You lend money,' she gasped.
'Vot you vont to pawn?' he thrust at her. Although his voice was gentle, she was startled at such crudity of expression.
'I've nothing here now. I wanted to borrow forty pounds.'
He glanced sideways at her, regarding her rusty, unfashionable clothing, her rough hands and broken nails, the tarnish on the thin, worn, gold band of her solitary ring, her ludicrous battered hat missing, with his glittering eyes, no item of her sad and worthless attire. He thought she must be mad. Caressing his fleshy, curved nose between his finger and thumb he said thoughtfully:
'Zat es a lot of monesh. Ve must ave security. You must bring gold or jewels if you vish to raise zat amount.'
She should, of course, have had jewels! In her novels these were the touchstone of a lady's security, but, apart from her wedding ring, she had only her mother's silver watch which she might, with good fortune, have pledged for fifteen shillings and, realising something of the insufficiency of her position she faltered:
'You would not lend it on my furniture or or on note of hand. I saw in the papers some people do that, do they not?'
He continued to rub his nose, considering, beneath his benignly tallowed brow, that these Gentile women were all alike scraggy and worn and stupid. Did she not realise that his business was conducted on the basis of shillings, not of pounds? And that, though he could produce the sum she required, he would require security and interest which he had realised at his initial survey to be utterly beyond her? He shook his head, gently but finally, and said, without ceasing to be conciliatory, using indeed, to that end his deprecating hands:
'Ve don't do zat beesness. Try a bigger firm say en ze ceety. Oh, ye! Zey might do et. Zey have more monesh zan a poor man like me.'
She regarded him with a palpitating heart in stunned, humiliated silence, having braved the danger and suffered the indignity of entering his wretched hovel without achieving her purpose. Yet she was obliged to accept his decision she had no appeal and she was out once more in the dirty street amongst the puddles, the littered tin cans and the garbage in the gutter, without having procured even one of the forty pounds she required. She was utterly abased and humiliated yet, as she walked quickly away, she appreciated with a growing anxiety that, though she had achieved nothing, Matt would at this very moment be waiting in immediate anticipation of the arrival of the money. Lowering her umbrella over her face to avoid detection, she hastened her steps feverishly towards home.
Nessie awaited her in a small imitation apron, triumphantly playing the housewife over her neat pile of clean crockery, preparing herself for her just reward of sweetmeats, but Mamma thrust her roughly aside.
'Another time, Nessie,' she cried. 'Don't bother me! I'll get you them another time.' She entered the scullery and plunged her hand into the box where old copies of newspapers and periodicals, brought home by Brodie, were kept for household purposes, chiefly the kindling of fires. Removing a pile of these, she spread them out upon the stone floor and flung herself before them on her knees, as though she grovelled before some false god. She hurriedly ran her eye over several of these sheets until, with an inarticulate cry of relief, she found what she sought. What had that wretched Jew said ? 'Try a bigger firm,' he had told her, in his indecently garbled English, and, accordingly, she chose the largest advertisement in the column, which informed her with many glowing embellishments that Adam McSevitch a genuine Scotsman lent 5 to 500, without security, on note of hand alone; that country clients would be attended promptly at their own homes, and, memorable feature, that the strictest and most inviolable secrecy would be preserved nay, insisted upon between the principal and his client.
Mrs. Brodie breathed more calmly as, without removing her hat or coat, she rose to her feet, hurried to the kitchen and sat down and composed a short, but carefully worded letter, asking Adam McSevitch to attend her at her home on Monday forenoon at eleven o'clock. She sealed the letter with the utmost precaution, then dragged her tired limbs out of the house and into the town once more. In her haste the constant pain in her side throbbed more intensely, but she did not allow it to interfere with her progress and by half-past three she succeeded in reaching the general post office, where she bought a stamp and carefully posted her letter. She then composed and dispatched a wire to 'Brodie: Poste Restante: Marseilles', saying,
'Money arrives Monday sure. Love. Mamma.' The cost of the message left her stricken, but though she might have reduced the cost by omitting the last two words, she could not force herself to do so. Matt must be made to understand, above everything, that it was she who, with her own hands, had sent the wire, and that she, his mother, loved him.
A sense of comfort assuaged her on her way home; the feeling that she had accomplished something and that on Monday she would assuredly obtain the money, reassured her, yet nevertheless, as the day dragged slowly to its end, she began to grow restless and impatient. The consolation obtained from her definite action gradually wore of! and left her sad, inert and helpless, obsessed by distressing doubts. She fluctuated between extremes of indecision and terror; felt that she would not obtain the money, then that she would be surely discovered; questioned her ability to carry through the undertaking; fled in her mind from the fact, as from an unreal and horrid nightmare, that she of all people should be attempting to deal with money-lenders.
Sunday dragged past her in an endless succession of interminable minutes, during the passage of which she glanced at the clock a hundred times, as if she might thus hasten the laboured transit of time and so terminate her own anxiety and the painful expectancy of her son. During the slow hours of the tardily passing day, she formed and reformed the simple plan she had made, trembled to think how
she would address Mr. McSevitch, was convinced that he would treat her as a lady, then felt certain that he would not, reread his advertisement secretly, was cheered by his comforting offer to lend ^500, then shocked by the amazing effrontery of it. When she retired eventually to rest, her head whirled with confusion, and she dreamed she was overwhelmed by an avalanche of golden pieces.
On Monday morning she could hardly maintain her normal demeanour, she shook so palpably with apprehension, but mercifully her anxiety was not detected and she sighed with relief when first Nessie, and then Brodie, disappeared through the front door. She now had only Grandma Brodie to dispose of, for from the moment she had written her letter she had fully appreciated the obvious danger of having the inquisitive, garrulous and hostile old woman about the house at the time fixed for the interview. The danger that she might stumble upon the entire situation was too great to be risked, and Mamma, with unthought-of cunning, prepared to attack her upon her weakest point. At half-past nine therefore, when she took up to the old woman her usual breakfast of porridge and milk, she did not, as was her custom, immediately leave the room, but instead sat down upon the bed and regarded its aged occupant with an assumed and exaggerated expression of concern.
'Grandma,' she began, 'you never seem to get out the house these days at all. You look real peaky to me the now. Why don't you take a bit stroll this morning?' The old dame poised the porridge spoon in her yellow claw and cast a suspicious eye upon Mamma from under her white, frilled nightcap.
'And where would I stroll to on a winter's day?' she asked distrustfully. 'Do ye want me to get inflammation of the lungs so as you can get rid o' me?'
Mamma forced a bright laugh, an exhibition of gaiety which it tortured her heart to perform.
