Children of the Ghetto | Page 7

ever
between the one and the other. He had applied for help to the Jewish
Board of Guardians, but red-tape rarely unwinds as quickly as hunger
coils itself; moreover, Moses was an old offender in poverty at the
Court of Charity. But there was one species of alms which Moses could
not be denied, and the existence of which Esther could not conceal
from him as she concealed that of the eleemosynary breakfasts at the
school. For it was known to all men that soup and bread were to be had

for the asking thrice a week at the Institution in Fashion Street, and in
the Ansell household the opening of the soup-kitchen was looked
forward to as the dawn of a golden age, when it would be impossible to
pass more than one day without bread. The vaguely-remembered smell
of the soup threw a poetic fragrance over the coming winter. Every year
since Esther's mother had died, the child had been sent to fetch home
the provender, for Moses, who was the only other available member of
the family, was always busy praying when he had nothing better to do.
And so to-night Esther fared to the kitchen, with her red pitcher,
passing in her childish eagerness numerous women shuffling along on
the same errand, and bearing uncouth tin cans supplied by the
institution. An individualistic instinct of cleanliness made Esther prefer
the family pitcher. To-day this liberty of choice has been taken away,
and the regulation can, numbered and stamped, serves as a soup-ticket.
There was quite a crowd of applicants outside the stable-like doors of
the kitchen when Esther arrived, a few with well-lined stomachs,
perhaps, but the majority famished and shivering. The feminine
element swamped the rest, but there were about a dozen men and a few
children among the group, most of the men scarce taller than the
children--strange, stunted, swarthy, hairy creatures, with muddy
complexions illumined by black, twinkling eyes. A few were of
imposing stature, wearing coarse, dusty felt hats or peaked caps, with
shaggy beards or faded scarfs around their throats. Here and there, too,
was a woman of comely face and figure, but for the most part it was a
collection of crones, prematurely aged, with weird, wan, old-world
features, slip-shod and draggle-tailed, their heads bare, or covered with
dingy shawls in lieu of bonnets--red shawls, gray shawls, brick-dust
shawls, mud-colored shawls. Yet there was an indefinable touch of
romance and pathos about the tawdriness and witch-like ugliness, and
an underlying identity about the crowd of Polish, Russian, German,
Dutch Jewesses, mutually apathetic, and pressing forwards. Some of
them had infants at their bare breasts, who drowsed quietly with
intervals of ululation. The women devoid of shawls had nothing around
their necks to protect them from the cold, the dusky throats were
exposed, and sometimes even the first hooks and eyes of the bodice
were unnecessarily undone. The majority wore cheap earrings and
black wigs with preternaturally polished hair; where there was no wig,

the hair was touzled.
At half-past five the stable-doors were thrown open, and the crowd
pressed through a long, narrow white-washed stone corridor into a
barn-like compartment, with a white-washed ceiling traversed by
wooden beams. Within this compartment, and leaving but a narrow,
circumscribing border, was a sort of cattle-pen, into which the paupers
crushed, awaiting amid discomfort and universal jabber the divine
moment. The single jet of gas-light depending from the ceiling flared
upon the strange simian faces, and touched them into a grotesque
picturesqueness that would have delighted Doré.
They felt hungry, these picturesque people; their near and dear ones
were hungering at home. Voluptuously savoring in imagination the
operation of the soup, they forgot its operation as a dole in aid of wages;
were unconscious of the grave economical possibilities of
pauperization and the rest, and quite willing to swallow their
independence with the soup. Even Esther, who had read much, and was
sensitive, accepted unquestioningly the theory of the universe that was
held by most people about her, that human beings were distinguished
from animals in having to toil terribly for a meagre crust, but that their
lot was lightened by the existence of a small and semi-divine class
called Takeefim, or rich people, who gave away what they didn't want.
How these rich people came to be, Esther did not inquire; they were as
much a part of the constitution of things as clouds and horses. The
semi-celestial variety was rarely to be met with. It lived far away from
the Ghetto, and a small family of it was said to occupy a whole house.
Representatives of it, clad in rustling silks or impressive broad-cloth,
and radiating an indefinable aroma of superhumanity, sometimes came
to the school, preceded by the beaming Head Mistress; and