through her diamond-paned window he saw the wrinkled, white-capped old creature spinning peacefully at the rustic chimney-corner, a pure cloistral crone. it seemed profane to connect such a figure with flirtation—this was surely the very virgin of senility. what a fine picture she made too! why had he never thought of painting her? yes, such a picture of 'the spinster' would be distinctly interesting. and he would put in the kesubah, the marriage certificate that hung over the mantelpiece, in ironical reminder of her days of bloom. he unlatched the door—he had never been used to knock at grannie's door, and the childish instinct came back to him.
'guten abend,' he said.
[316]she adjusted a pair of horn spectacles, and peered at him.
'guten abend,' she murmured.
'you don't remember me—vroomkely.' he used the old childish diminutive of abraham, though he had almost forgotten he owned the name in full.
'vroomkely,' she gasped, almost overturning her wheel as she sprang to hug him in her skinny arms. he had a painful sense that she had shrunk back almost to childish dimensions. her hands seemed trembling as much with decay as with emotion. she hastened to produce from the well-known cupboard home-made kuchen and other dainties of his youth, with no sense of the tragedy that lay in his no longer being tempted by them.
'and how goes your trade?' she said. 'they say you have never been slack. they must build many houses in rome.' her notion that he was a house-painter he hardly cared to contradict, especially as picture-painting was contrary to the mosaic dispensation.
'oh, i haven't been only in rome,' he said evasively. 'i have been in many lands.'
fire came into her eyes, and flashed through the big spectacles. 'you have been to palestine?' she cried.
'no, only as far as egypt. why?'
'i thought you might have brought me a clod of palestine earth to put in my grave.' the fire died out of her spectacles, she sighed, and took a consolatory pinch of snuff.
'don't talk of graves—you will live to be a hundred and more,' he cried. but he was thinking how [317]ridiculous gossip was. it spared neither age nor sexlessness, not even this shrivelled ancient who was meditating on her latter end. suddenly he became aware of a shadow darkening the doorway. at the same instant the fire leapt back into his grandmother's glasses. instinctively, almost before he turned his head, he knew it was the hero of the romance.
yossel mandelstein looked even less of a hero than the artist had remembered. there had been something wistful and pathetic in the hunchback's expression, some hint of inner eager fire, but this—if he had not merely imagined it—seemed to have died of age and hopelessness. he used crutches, too, to help himself along with, so that he seemed less the hunchback of yore than the conventional contortion of time, and but for the familiar earlocks pendent on either side of the fur cap, but for the great hooked nose and the small chin hidden in the big beard, the artist might have doubted if this was indeed the yossel he had sometimes mocked at in the crude cruelty of boyhood.
yossel, propped on his crutches, was pulling out a mouldering black-covered book from under his greasy caftan. 'i have brought you back your chovoth halvovoth,' he said.
in the vivid presence of the actual romance the artist could not suppress the smile he had kept back at the mere shadowy recital. in rome he himself had not infrequently called on young ladies by way of returning books to them. it was true that the books he returned were not hebrew treatises, but he smiled again to think that the name of yossel's volume signified 'the duties of the heart.' the bube yenta [318]received the book with thanks, and a moment of embarrassment ensued, only slightly mitigated by the offer of the snuffbox. yossel took a pinch, but his eyes seemed roving in amaze, less over the stranger than over the bespread table, as though he might unaccountably have overlooked some sacred festival. that two are company and three none seemed at this point a proverb to be heeded, and without waiting to renew the hero's acquaintance, the artist escaped from the idyllic cottage. let the lover profit by the pastry for which he himself was too old.
so the gossips spoke the truth, he thought, his amusement not unblended with a touch of his mother's indignation. surely, if his grandmother wished to cultivate a grand passion, she might have chosen a more sightly object of devotion. not that there was much to be said for yossel's taste either. when after seventy-five years of celibacy the fascinations of the other sex began to tell upon him, he might at least have succumbed to a less matriarchal form of femininity. but perhaps his grandmother had fascinations of another order. perhaps she had money. he put the question to his mother.
'certainly she has money,' said his mother vindictively. 'she has thousands of gulden in her stocking. twenty years ago she could have had her pick of a dozen well-to-do widowers, yet now that she has one foot in the grave, madness has entered her soul, and she has cast her eye upon this pauper.'
'but i thought his father left him his inn,' said the artist.
'his inn—yes. his sense—no. yossel ruined himself long ago paying too much attention to the [319]talmud instead of his business. he was always a schlemihl.'
'but can one pay too much attention to the talmud? that is a strange saying for a rabbi's daughter.'
'king solomon tells us there is a time for everything,' returned the rabbi's daughter. 'yossel neglected what the wise king said, and so now he comes trying to wheedle your poor grandmother out of her money. if he wanted to marry, why didn't he marry before eighteen, as the talmud prescribes?'
'he seems to do everything at the wrong time,' laughed her son. 'do you suppose, by the way, that king solomon made all his thousand marriages before he was eighteen?'
'make not mock of holy things,' replied his mother angrily.
the monetary explanation of the romance, he found, was the popular one in the village. it did not, however, exculpate the grandame from the charge of forwardness, since if she wished to contract another marriage it could have been arranged legitimately by the shadchan, and then the poor marriage-broker, who got little enough to do in this god-forsaken village, might have made a few gulden out of it.
beneath all his artistic perception of the humours of the thing, schneemann found himself prosaically sharing the general disapprobation of the marriage. really, when one came to think of it, it was ridiculous that he should have a new grandfather thrust upon him. and such a grandfather! perhaps the bube was, indeed, losing her reason. or was it he himself who was losing his reason, taking seriously this [320]parochial scandal, and believing that because a doddering hunchback of seventy-five had borrowed an ethical treatise from an octogenarian a marriage must be on the tapis? yet, on more than one occasion, he came upon circumstances which seemed to justify the popular supposition. there could be no doubt, for example, that when at the conclusion of the synagogue service the feminine stream from the women's gallery poured out to mingle with the issuing males, these two atoms drifted together with unnatural celerity. it appeared to be established beyond question that on the preceding feast of tabernacles the bube had lent and practically abandoned to the hunchback's use the ritual palm-branch he was too poor to afford. of course this might only have been gratitude, inasmuch as a fortnight earlier on the solemn new year day when, by an untimely decree, the grandmother lay ill abed, yossel had obtained possession of the shofar, and leaving the synagogue had gone to blow it to her. he had blown the holy horn—with due regard to the proprieties—in the downstairs room of her cottage so that she above had heard it, and having heard it could breakfast. it was a performance that charity reasonably required for a disabled fellow-creature, and yet what medieval knight had found a more delicate way of trumpeting his mistress's charms? besides, how had yossel known that the heroine was ill? his eye must have roved over the women's gallery, and disentangled her absence even from the huddled mass of weeping and swaying womanhood.
one day came the crowning item of evidence. the grandmother had actually asked the village postman [321]to oblige her by delivering a brown parcel at yossel's lodgings. the postman was not a child of the covenant, but yossel's landlady was, and within an hour all jewry knew that yenta had sent yossel a phylacteries-bag—the very symbol of love offered by a maiden to her bridegroom. could shameless passion further go?
