She was in an ante-room, whose doors stood open upon the larger room beyond. Both rooms seemed incredibly crowded, though as she realised, furtively looking about her, this effect was due to the informal way in which people had grouped themselves, and to the extraordinary mixture of people present. Entering, her embarrassment had been given a final wrench by the impression that all the women were in full evening-dress; but now, among these islands of glittering silk and lace she noticed other figures, some habited, as she said to herself, “like artists,” others patently of the working class. Immediately in front of her stood a bald-headed old gentleman, wearing a plaid rug over his shoulders. To her left she looked down upon the polished shoulders and swaying fan of a ballroom elegant. Beside her was a Jewish boy, a hump-back, with a face that hunger had sharpened into a painful beauty. He had moved aside to make way for her and, seeing her flowers, had smiled. Otherwise no one seemed inclined to take the least notice of her.
I may get out of it yet, she said to herself.
There was talk; but it was of a quality, hushed and hesitant, that suggested the talk that rises among people who are waiting through the indeterminate interval between one item of a concert and another. Perhaps it was a concert. In the farther room the strings of a harp had been plucked. For some while her unused ears could make little of what was being said; but as her nerves quieted, and the hope of keeping her anonymity crept higher, she began to prick her ears, saying to herself that Frederick’s voice, at any rate, would emerge to her on its familiarity. But it was another voice that she first caught in the entirety of a sentence, a loud fulsome voice that said, speaking French with a German accent,
“Most beautiful Minna, we are here to be enchanted. Will you not wave your wand, will you not tell us one of your beautiful
Maerchen
?”
Good God, what a menagerie! exclaimed Sophia to herself, disgusted at the speech and the manner. The little Jew had turned his head and was looking at her compassionately. Why, she wondered. She saw the bunch of mimosa trembling in her grasp. For those words addressed to Minna,
most beautiful Minna
, had brought her rival before her, in a flash making real the hearsay hated one, stabbing into her consciousness the knowledge that the woman lived and breathed, and was in the very room.
The fulsome voice was lost among other voices making the same request. That’s Frederick! her mind cried out, and forgot him in the next instant, hearing in reply the voice whose ghost had spoken at her child’s bedside, saying,
Ma fleur
.
“No, not a fairy-tale. I have told so many. This, this shall be a true story.”
See her she must. And in the jostle of rearrangement which had followed the requesting voices, Sophia shifted her place till she could see from the ante-room into the room beyond. When she could hear again, Minna was already speaking, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her face propped between her hands — the attitude of one crouched over a sleepy fire, watching the embers waste and brighten and waste again.
“But the first thing I can remember is the lighting of a candle.
“It is night, the middle of the night it seems to me, waking as a child does into that different world, mysterious, unfathomable, which night is to a child. A separate world, as though one awoke in the depths of the sea. My father is there, moving softly in the dusky room. He speaks to himself in a language which I have never heard before, and coming to the hearth he takes up an ember with the tongs, and breathes on it, as though he were praying to it. At his breath it awakens and glows, and I see his face, and his lips moving amid his beard. Then with the ember he lights tall yellow candles; and as the flame straightens he straightens also, and begins to chant in the strange language, raising his hand to his forehead, bowing and making obeisance. On his forehead is a little box, and over his head is the praying towel.
“For it is the Sabbath candle he had lit, and alone, in the depth of the night, in secret, he is praying to the God of our race, and glorifying him.
“I cannot understand it, and yet I can understand it well enough to know that it is something secret and precious, a jewel that can only be taken out at night. Afterwards, how long afterwards I cannot remember, I spoke to him of what I had seen. Then he told me how we were of the chosen people, exiles from Jerusalem, captive in this world as the gold is captive in the rock and trodden underfoot by those who go to and fro. And he showed me a book, written in our holy language; and in that book, he said, were the stories of good Jewesses, faithful women: Jael, who slew Sisera, and Judith who slew Holophernes; Deborah, who led an army, and Esther, who saved a people.
“It seemed to me that their stories were written against the sky. For our house, our hovel, stood at the edge of a fir-forest, and those black stems and branches, leaning and jagged, line after line, were like the Hebrew letters in the book; and as I ran through the forest, picking up sticks and fir-cones for fuel, I used to make stories to myself, stories of Jewish women, reading them from the book of the trees.
“But that was in summer, an endless lifetime, when the sky was as blue as a cornflower, when I picked wild strawberries, and sucked flowers for nectar, and heard the contented bleating of our goats as they ate the sweet pasture, and the endless drone of the insects in the forest. And as day and night were different worlds, so were winter and summer. But best of all I remember the first spring.
“In the night, the wind changed. I woke up, and heard a different voice, loud like the coming of an army, and yet thick and gentle, as though it wrapped one in velvet. I pinched my mother, and said, ‘What’s that?’ She woke with a start, and lay still, listening and trembling. ‘It is the thaw-wind,’ she said, ‘blowing from Jerusalem. With the Holy One is mercy.’ And she gathered me closer, and fell asleep again, and the wind seemed like her snores, warm and kind.
“The wind brought rain, a soft brushing rain like tassels of silk. The hard crust of snow was covered with little pits, and the goats bleated in the shed. The snow began to fall off the roof in great clods that smashed as they fell. Suddenly the flat grey sky was blue, was lofty, with shining clouds, and a bird flew past the door. When I ran out the snow wetted my feet. It was beginning to melt, and I kicked and danced until I had scrabbled a hole, and there at the bottom of the hole was the ground again, with the grasses squashed and stiff and earth-coloured. I knelt by the hole, and rubbed my cheek against the ground, and snuffed it. Then I looked up at the sky, and the clouds were going so fast and so lightly that I felt giddy, as though the earth were sliding away under me. I ran about, kicking the melting snow, and shouting little tags of Hebrew that I had learned from my father.
“Day after day the wind blew warm, and the snow melted, and the ground appeared, and thawed, and clucked like a hen, drinking the snow-water. Blades of new grass came up, and small bright flowers, flocks of birds came flying, and settled on the patches of cleared ground, or pecked at the glistening tree-trunks. My mother came out into the yard, shading her eyes with one hand, holding on her other arm my little brother, who blinked and sneezed. He had been born in the winter, this was the first time he had felt the sun. I tugged at her skirts. ‘Let us go for a walk, let us go a long way,’ I begged. ‘To-morrow,’ she said.
“But on the morrow we could not go out at all, for the wind had shifted, hail-storms flew by, one after another like a flight of screaming cranes whose wings stretched over the whole world. The ground was whitened with hailstones, and the birds lay under the bushes, frozen to death. But the spring could not be stopped now, it came back again, the sun shone, clouds of midges sprang up from nowhere, the bushes swayed like dancers, shadows rippled over the earth like running water.
“When we were out of doors my mother seemed a different woman, walking with a freer step, singing as she walked. She carried her baby on her back, slung in a shawl, and I, thinking always of the women of Jewry, fancied that she was like Judith’s handmaid, carrying the tyrant’s head over the hills of Bethulia. We went over the heath, farther than ever I had been. It was piebald with snow, and the pools of bogwater we passed, fringed with cat-ice, were so violently blue under the blue sky that I was almost afraid of them. There was colour, too, in the birch copses, as though the stems had been smeared with damson juice. By one of these copses my mother sat down to suckle her baby. The sun shone on her breast, and it was as though her ugly clothes had been thawed away from this smooth strong pushing flower. When the baby was quieted I heard, through the small noises of the wood, other far-off sounds — roarings and crashes. ‘The wolves are fighting!’ I cried out, but she shook her head. And presently we went on towards the sounds. If it is not wolves, I thought, it must be woodmen; for now among the crashes that were as though a tree had fallen I heard yelling cries like the whine of a saw. And we came to the wood’s end, and stood on the bank of a river.
“On either side it was still frozen, the arched ice rearing up above the water like opened jaws. But in the centre channel the current flowed furiously, and borne along on it, jostling and crashing, turning over and over, grating together with long harsh screams, were innumerable blocks of ice. As the river flowed its strong swirling tongue licked furiously at the icy margins, and undermined them, and with a shudder and a roar of defeat another fragment would break away and be swept downstream. It was like a battle. It was like a victory. The rigid winter could stand no longer, it was breaking up, its howls and vanquished threats swept past me, its strongholds fell and were broken one against another, it was routed at last.
“I wept with excitement, and my mother comforted me, thinking I was afraid. But I could not explain what I felt, though I knew it was not fear. For then I knew only the wintry words of my race, such words as exile, and captivity, and bondage. I had never heard the word Liberty. But it was Liberty I acclaimed, seeing the river sweeping away its fetters, tossing its free neck under the ruined yoke.”
She stopped abruptly, like the player lifting the bow from the strings with a flourish. Murmurs of admiration arose. She seemed to listen to them as the concerto player listens to the strains of the orchestra he has quitted, half relaxing from the stanza completed, half intent upon what lies before. This is all quite right, her expression said; presently I shall go on again. For she had raised her head, and now Sophia could see her face. It was ugly, uglier than one could have believed, hearing that voice. A discordant face, Sophia’s mind continued, analysing while it could, before the voice went on again; for the features with their Jewish baroque, the hooked nose, the crescent eyebrows and heavy eyelids, the large full-lipped mouth, are florid, or should be; but the hollow cheeks forbid them, and she is at once a heavy voluptuous cat and a starved one. Meanwhile she had omitted to look for Frederick. But it was too late, for Minna had begun to speak again.
“When the next spring came, I remembered the river. Another child had been born, my mother was busy, I seemed likely to beg in vain. And this spring, too, was not like the other. A weeping mist covered the land, a mist that brought pestilence. From the village, where I was not allowed to go, came the sound of the Christian church bell, tolling for the dead. Noemi, our neighbour, came to our house and told my mother that the Gentile women said that the pestilence had been seen on the heath, a troop of riders with lances, moving in the mist. My father looked up from his work. ‘Such tales are idolatrous,’ said he. ‘Do you, a good Jewess, believe them?’ ‘
I
do not believe them, Reb,’ she answered. ‘They sicken for their sins and their swine’s flesh. But let them believe it, if they will. It is better than if they said we poisoned their wells.’
“This story of the pestilence riding over the heath made me think better of my resolve that if my mother would not take me to the river I would find my way there alone. I began to pester my father, saying that though I was only a girl, I was the first-born. And at last he consented. But with him it was a different journey, for he walked fast, talking sometimes to himself but never to me. The air was raw and sunless, my feet hurt me and I almost wished that we had never come, until reaching the birch-wood I heard again those thunders and crashings. I ran on ahead, towards the sound, and came by myself to the river bank. A mist hung over the water, flowing with the river, the glory of the year before was not there. Then, as I looked, I saw that on the hurried ice-blocks there were shapes, men and horses, half frozen into the ice, half trailing in the water. And in the ice were stains of blood. Last year, I remembered, it had seemed like a battle, like a victory. Had there been blood and corpses then, and had I forgotten them? The full river seemed to flow more heavily, when ice-block struck against ice-block they clanged like iron bells. My father, coming up behind me, spoke to himself in Hebrew, and groaned. ‘Who are they, Father?’ ‘The wrathful, child, the proud, and the enemies of God ... So let thine enemies perish, O Lord!’ He cried this out in a voice that rang above the tumult of the river. Then he was silent for a long time, shuddering and sighing like an animal. At last he told me that there must have been a battle, perhaps a war, where, who could tell? — and that the bodies of the slain, caught in the frost, may have been locked up winter-long, that now with the thaw were being hurried to the sea.
“All the way home, and for long after, I pondered over this thought, so new to me, that there were other people in the world, people living so far off that they might fight and perish and no word of it come to us, no splash of their blood. I knew from the Book, and from stories, that there had been peoples and nations; but I thought they were all dead. I was forbidden to go to the village, lest the children should throw stones at me. Our household, and Noemi’s and old Baruch’s, was Jewry, and the village the Gentiles. But now these dead men had come into my world.
“Soon came more living. For that summer, staggering over the heath and staring about them as if afraid, came a troop of strangers, men, women and children. They carried bundles and bits of household stuff, pots and pans flashing in the sun, wicker baskets with hens in them: some led goats, or a cow, and an old white horse drew a hooded cart that rocked and jolted on the moorland track. I was picking strawberries when I looked up and saw them; and spilling the fruit I leaped up and ran home, to tell this strange news. ‘They are gipsies,’ my mother said. ‘Run, child, and fetch in the washing.’ Somehow I had heard of gipsies, for I said, ‘No, they are not gipsies. These people could never dance.’ My father went a little way to where he could see them, my mother following him. I saw her start, and wring her hands as if in pity, and then they hastened forward towards the strangers. My father embraced the foremost, an old man whose bald head glistened with sweat, my mother hurried to and fro among the women. I could hear her voice, loud with excitement, exclaiming and condoling.
“For they were a settlement of Jews, who had been driven out of their homes, and had come over the heath looking for some place where they might live unmolested. That night, and for many nights to come, they camped on our meadow, and my mother fed them, and beat up herbs to put on their blistered feet. Their goats quarrelled with ours, their children played and quarrelled with us. In fancy, remembering their coming across the heath, I told myself that they had come like Eliezer’s embassy, with servants and camels, to ask for me in marriage. In fact, since their poverty was even more abject than ours, I lorded it over the new-come children, and discovered the sweets of tyranny.”
She paused again, but this time gently, and with a sly smile.
And you must still savour them, thought Sophia, seeing that mournful dark glance flicker slowly over the listeners, as though numbering so many well-tied money-bags. Our ears are your ducats. You are exactly like a Jewish shopkeeper, the Jew who kept the antique shop at Mayence, staring, gloating round his shelves, with a joy in possession so absorbing that it was almost a kind of innocence. In a moment you should rub your hands, the shopkeeper’s gesture.
At that moment the slowly flickering glance touched her, and rested. It showed no curiosity, only a kind of pondering attention. Then, as though in compliance, Minna’s large supple hands gently caressed themselves together in the very gesture of her thought. Sophia started slightly. The glance, mournfully numbering, moved on. But answering Sophia’s infinitesimal start of surprise there had been a smile — small, meek, and satisfied, the smile of a dutiful child. And again there had been no time to look for Frederick.
“My position among these children was the stronger, since my father, by his learning and orthodoxy, was looked up to by all the newcomers. He led them in prayer, he exhorted them to cherish our faith, he comforted and advised them. By the end of the summer many of the immigrants had built themselves huts out of the forest, and settled near us. I was delighted with this, seeing that it gave us company and consequence. I blamed my poor mother for narrow-heartedness, since she did not rejoice as much as I did. Bending over the loom she would sigh and shake her head; and among the clatter of the pedals I overheard such words as these: ‘One or two they will suffer. But not a multitude.’ And then she would weep, her tears falling on the growing web. But for all these doubts, which I could see but not understand, she did what she could for our neighbours, our neighbours who were even poorer than ourselves.