Children of the Ghetto | Page 9

semi-divine and
wholly divine persons (in white ties) must move and second (with
eloquence and length) votes of thanks to the President, the Rabbinate,
and all other available recipients; a French visitor must express his
admiration of English charity. But at last the turn of the gnawing
stomachs came. The motley crowd, still babbling, made a slow,
forward movement, squeezing painfully through the narrow aperture,

and shivering a plate glass window pane at the side of the cattle-pen in
the crush; the semi-divine persons rubbed their hands and smiled
genially; ingenious paupers tried to dodge round to the cauldrons by the
semi-divine entrance; the tropical humming-birds fluttered among the
crows; there was a splashing of ladles and a gurgling of cascades of
soup into the cans, and a hubbub of voices; a toothless, white-haired,
blear-eyed hag lamented in excellent English that soup was refused her,
owing to her case not having yet been investigated, and her tears
moistened the one loaf she received. In like hard case a Russian threw
himself on the stones and howled. But at last Esther was running
through the mist, warmed by the pitcher which she hugged to her
bosom, and suppressing the blind impulse to pinch the pair of loaves
tied up in her pinafore. She almost flew up the dark flight of stairs to
the attic in Royal Street. Little Sarah was sobbing querulously. Esther,
conscious of being an angel of deliverance, tried to take the last two
steps at once, tripped and tumbled ignominiously against the
garret-door, which flew back and let her fall into the room with a crash.
The pitcher shivered into fragments under her aching little bosom, the
odorous soup spread itself in an irregular pool over the boards, and
flowed under the two beds and dripped down the crevices into the room
beneath. Esther burst into tears; her frock was wet and greased, her
hands were cut and bleeding. Little Sarah checked her sobs at the
disaster. Moses Ansell was not yet returned from evening service, but
the withered old grandmother, whose wizened face loomed through the
gloom of the cold, unlit garret, sat up on the bed and cursed her angrily
for a Schlemihl. A sense of injustice made Esther cry more bitterly. She
had never broken anything for years past. Ikey, an eerie-looking dot of
four and a half years, tottered towards her (all the Ansells had learnt to
see in the dark), and nestling his curly head against her wet bodice,
murmured:
"Neva mind, Estie, I lat oo teep in my new bed."
The consolation of sleeping in that imaginary new bed to the
possession of which Ikey was always looking forward was apparently
adequate; for Esther got up from the floor and untied the loaves from
her pinafore. A reckless spirit of defiance possessed her, as of a

gambler who throws good money after bad. They should have a mad
revelry to-night--the two loaves should be eaten at once. One (minus a
hunk for father's supper) would hardly satisfy six voracious appetites.
Solomon and Rachel, irrepressibly excited by the sight of the bread,
rushed at it greedily, snatched a loaf from Esther's hand, and tore off a
crust each with their fingers.
"Heathen," cried the old grandmother. "Washing and benediction."
Solomon was used to being called a "heathen" by the Bube. He put on
his cap and went grudgingly to the bucket of water that stood in a
corner of the room, and tipped a drop over his fingers. It is to be feared
that neither the quantity of water nor the area of hand covered reached
even the minimum enjoined by Rabbinical law. He murmured
something intended for Hebrew during the operation, and was
beginning to mutter the devout little sentence which precedes the eating
of bread when Rachel, who as a female was less driven to the lavatory
ceremony, and had thus got ahead of him, paused in her ravenous
mastication and made a wry face. Solomon took a huge bite at his crust,
then he uttered an inarticulate "pooh," and spat out his mouthful.
There was no salt in the bread.
CHAPTER II.
THE SWEATER.
The catastrophe was not complete. There were some long thin fibres of
pale boiled meat, whose juices had gone to enrich the soup, lying about
the floor or adhering to the fragments of the pitcher. Solomon, who was
a curly-headed chap of infinite resource, discovered them, and it had
just been decided to neutralize the insipidity of the bread by the
far-away flavor of the meat, when a peremptory knocking was heard at
the door, and a dazzling vision of beauty bounded into the room.
"'Ere! What are you doin', leavin' things leak through our ceiling?"
Becky Belcovitch was a buxom, bouncing girl, with cherry cheeks that

looked exotic