Ghetto Tragedies. Israel Zangwill

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СКАЧАТЬ eloquence a reminder of the Rabbi God had thrown away in him.

      VII

      Amid the endless babble of suggestions made to her for Brum's cure, one—repeated several times by different persons—hooked itself to her distracted brain. Germany! There was a great eye-doctor in Germany, who could do anything and everything. Yes, she would go to Germany.

      This resolution, at which Jossel shrugged his shoulders in despairing scepticism, was received with rapture by Brum. How he had longed to see foreign countries, to pass over that shining sea which whispered and beckoned so, at Brighton and Ramsgate! He almost forgot he would not see Germany, unless the eye-doctor were a miracle-monger indeed.

      But he was doomed to a double disappointment; for instead of his going to Germany, Germany came to him, so to speak, in the shape of the specialist's annual visit to London; and the great man had nothing soothing to say, only a compassionate head to shake, with ominous warnings to make the best of a bad job and fatten up the poor boy.

      Nor did Zillah's attempts to read take her out of the infant primers, despite long hours of knitted brow and puckered lips, and laborious triumphs over the childish sentences, by patient addition of syllable to syllable. She also tried to write, but got no further than her own name, imitated from the envelopes.

      To occupy Brum's days, Jossel, gaining enlightenment in the ways of darkness, procured Braille books. But the boy had read most of the stock works thus printed for the blind, and his impatient brain fretted at the tardiness of finger-reading. Jossel's one consolation was that the boy would not have to earn his living. The thought, however, of how his blind heir would be cheated by agents and rent-collectors was a touch of bitter even in this solitary sweet.

      VIII

      It was the Sabbath Fire-Woman who, appropriately enough, kindled the next glimmer of hope in Zillah's bosom. The one maid-of-all-work, who had supplied all the help and grandeur Zillah needed in her establishment, having transferred her services to a husband, Zillah was left searching for an angel at thirteen pounds a year. In the interim the old Irishwoman who made a few pence a week by attending to the Sabbath fires of the poor Jews of the neighbourhood, became necessary on Friday nights and Saturdays, to save the household from cold or sin.

      "Och, the quare little brat!" she muttered, when she first came upon the pale, gnome-like figure by the fender, tapping the big book, for all the world like the Leprechaun cobbling.

      "And can't he see at all, at all?" she asked Zillah confidentially one Sabbath, when the boy was out of the room.

      Zillah shook her head, unable to speak.

      "Nebbich!" compassionately sighed the Fire-Woman, who had corrupted her native brogue with "Yiddish." "And wud he be borrun dark?"

      "No, it came only a few months ago," faltered Zillah.

      The Fire-Woman crossed herself.

      "Sure, and who'll have been puttin' the Evil Oi on him?" she asked.

      Zillah's face was convulsed.

      "I always said so!" she cried; "I always said so!"

      "The divil burrun thim all!" cried the Fire-Woman, poking the coals viciously.

      "Yes, but I don't know who it is. They envied me my beautiful child, my lamb, my only one. And nothing can be done." She burst into tears.

      "Nothin' is a harrd wurrd! If he was my bhoy, the darlint, I'd cure him, aisy enough, so I wud."

      Zillah's sobs ceased. "How?" she asked, her eyes gleaming strangely.

      "I'd take him to the Pope, av course."

      "The Pope!" repeated Zillah vaguely.

      "Ay, the Holy Father! The ownly man in this wurruld that can take away the Evil Oi."

      Zillah gasped. "Do you mean the Pope of Rome?"

      She knew the phrase somehow, but what it connoted was very shadowy and sinister: some strange, mighty chief of hostile heathendom.

      "Who else wud I be manin'? The Holy Mother I'd be for prayin' to meself; but as ye're a Jewess, I dursn't tell ye to do that. But the Pope, he's a gintleman, an' so he is, an' sorra a bit he'll moind that ye don't go to mass, whin he shpies that poor, weeshy, pale shrimp o' yours. He'll just wave his hand, shpake a wurrd, an' whisht! in the twinklin' of a bedposht ye'll be praisin' the Holy Mother."

      Zillah's brain was whirling. "Go to Rome!" she said.

      The Fire-Woman poised the poker.

      "Well, ye can't expect the Pope to come to Dalston!"

      "No, no; I don't mean that," said Zillah, in hasty apology. "Only it's so far off, and I shouldn't know how to go."

      "It's not so far off as Ameriky, an' it's two broths of bhoys I've got there."

      "Isn't it?" asked Zillah.

      "No, Lord love ye: an' sure gold carries ye anywhere nowadays, ixcept to Heaven."

      "But if I got to Rome, would the Pope see the child?"

      "As sartin as the child wud see him," the Fire-Woman replied emphatically.

      "He can do miracles, then?" inquired Zillah.

      "What else wud he be for? Not that 'tis much of a miracle to take away the Evil Oi, bad scran to the witch!"

      "Then perhaps our Rabbi can do it, too?" cried Zillah, with a sudden hope.

      The Fire-Woman shook her head. "Did ye ever hear he could?"

      "No," admitted Zillah.

      "Thrue for you, mum. Divil a wurrd wud I say aginst your Priesht—wan's as good as another, maybe, for ivery-day use; but whin it comes to throuble and heart-scaldin', I pity the poor craythurs who can't put up a candle to the blessed saints—an' so I do. Niver a bhoy o' mine has crassed the ocean without the Virgin havin' her candle."

      "And did they arrive safe?"

      "They did so; ivery mother's son av 'em."

      IX

      The more the distracted mother pondered over this sensational suggestion, the more it tugged at her. Science and Judaism had failed her: perhaps this unknown power, this heathen Pope, had indeed mastery over things diabolical. Perhaps the strange religion he professed had verily a saving efficacy denied to her own. Why should she not go to Rome?

      True, the journey loomed before her as fearfully as a Polar Expedition to an ordinary mortal. Germany she had been prepared to set out for: it lay on the great route of Jewish migration westwards. But Rome? She did not even know where it was. But her new skill in reading would, she felt, help her through the perils. She would be able to make out the names of the railway stations, if the train waited long enough.

      But with the cunning of the distracted she did not СКАЧАТЬ