TORCH-BEARERS
A SKETCH
Towards two in the morning an unsteady wind sprang up and commenced its inarticulate whimper among the bushes. A thin rain was falling, almost inaudible, save when the wind uplifted it and flung it in rattling handfuls against the panes. Sometimes a strayed current of air stole in under the door and swayed the flames on the seven candles ranged on the floor by the side of the dead woman. The lowest bough of the solitary tree in the yard scraped against the window, making the cold, uneasy sounds of excluded desolation.
How long we had been sitting thus silent, I with my eyes fixed on the seven quivering lights, he with his arms folded and his head sunk low, I cannot say, but suddenly he started up and spoke.
“Go,” he said, “and if you can, set it in a book, that all men may read it: set down every contemptible detail, every rebuff, every misunderstanding. Set the little things that make men laugh, things outrageously absurd, things exquisitely comical, things grotesquely unclean, and make of it the tragedy epitomised there.”
He raised his head and flung a glance at the black covering. Then he rose to his feet and strode savagely to and fro across the room. Abruptly he stopped opposite the window, and wheeled around to me.
"Dumb!" he burst out, "Dumb! And less silent in life than in death. And is there anyone to speak for her now? Does any one know now the meaning of the thousand trivialities of suffering which constituted her life? Thwartings, snubs, triumphs, an inextricable hotchpotch, seemingly purposeless . . ."
He stopped himself and paused. Then he went on more calmly.
“Listen,” he said, “and I will tell you everything I knew until to-night. Listen, and tell me what you would have made of it all.” .
He reseated himself, and folded his arms.
"My father was murdered three months after my seventh birthday. I have never learned the exact details of the affair, but I believe that in the little Russian village where my parents then lived there had always been a deep-seated Jew-hatred. This murder, whatever its immediate causes, was the result of long pent-up ill feeling. Over there one learns more or less to accept these occasional murders with blessings to God that these periodic bloodlettings prevent the systematic accumulation of enough hatred to make a whole pogrom.
"There were three of us children, myself, a little sister, and an elder brother. My mother sold out as soon as she could; she lost more than one-half in the sale, and was swindled out of more than half the rest, and then she came to England, to Manchester.
"She came here to a cousin of her husband's: you know how they come, with an illegible address written on a dirty scrap of paper, treasured in a leathern bag. She never found him, and she was absolutely left alone with the three of us.
"The first place we lived in was over there, Red Bank." He waved his hand, indicating one of the most miserable sections of the older city. "I remember the little front room we lived in, ten feet by ten, not more. My elder brother and I slept in a basket; my little sister slept with my mother on some kind of a mattress. My mother had about four pounds when she arrived here. In a month the money was gone, and she took to 'felling'—a kind of monotonous clothing work—
I don't know anything about it. I only remember that she was at it day and night. There is a picture in my mind which will never die: my mother sitting under the gaslight, stitching, stitching, stitching. Where I used to lie with my brother, in a corner of the room, I used to open my eyes late in the night—and there she was, her right hand going to and fro, her face bent over the coat. Now and then she would straighten up, hitch the coat round to get at another part and continue.
“I didn’t see things then as now. I simply knew that we lived in a dirty old street, that we didn’t have any ha’pennies, and that we didn’t have many new clothes. I used to roll about the gutter with my brother, fight the urchins, and get myself intolerably dirty. You take things as they come at seven and eight years of age, and I only remember these things well because they were persistent, not because I attached any importance to them. Only one or two things stand out vividly in my mind.
"I remember, how, returning from school on a Friday evening, I found my mother still at work. I was astonished and horrified, and I asked her in amazement how she came to be working on the Sabbath. She did not answer me, but fell to such a weeping as I had never seen before.
“She wept often, but in a quiet sort of way, particularly when she sang. She knew many obscure little village melodies, and whether they were grave or gay, merry or melancholy, she used to put the same tearful tremor into her voice when she sang them. I cannot hear those songs without re- membering those days.
"Telling you these things now I hardly know whether I am telling you the truth I see things so differently. I don't think I can reproduce for you my outlook of those days, especially my attitude to my mother. I think I was hardly conscious of any positive affection for her; she used to shout at me too often, and restrain me from rolling in the gutter, and from fighting; she used to send me on so many errands for work. I never did take to her as other children do to their mothers, with conscious affection, and exchange of caresses.
"My God! those times! What can I tell you to make you understand how wretched they were. I don't speak of myself. As a child of eight I was not particularly given to comparisons —but having come through those days I look back with horror, sometimes with a real fear, as we shudder at the memory of a danger which we have passed long ago.
"When my mother couldn't get felling work she used to go out cooking, or she took in washing. When she went out cooking she used to bring us back an apple or a cake. She never went out charring; that was considered the lowest thing a woman could fall to.
"And the shifts we used to go to for clothes and food!How loathesome it is in the recalling! Yet you know I amnot over fastidious or squeamish.
“We lived in that wretched front room for over three years. The house changed tenants four times—the poor have more houses than the rich. Once we had a drunken landlord who used to fight with his wife, and as often as not get beaten. Pah! Fights were commonplaces. On Saturday nights the streets were riotous with the fights and reconciliations of drunkards of both sexes. Swearing and curses rang through the streets till the small hours. That was mostly done by the Gentiles round there. Only occasionally two Jewish women took to settling their disputes in public.