Forward from Babylon

Russia--here was the first Babylon. Sitting on the metal stool, his second-hand velvet suit fraying against the heat of the oven, Philip's big eyes were round with horror of this immense, inscrutable place. Everything they said was portentous, not wholly real. Many of their words attained a meaning only after laborious thinking.

"_Kossacken_--big as trees!"

"Big spikes in front of the Gubernator's house! Babies stuck! Rachel, the parchment-maker's daughter, caught up on a white horse! Never heard of again!"

"Blood in the streets, thick!"

A fear and a helpless rage seized the faces there, always only half seen in the gloom of the kitchen. By day, beyond the bars which uselessly scowled against the small glass panes, the drab walls of the house next door kept away everything but a dirty and dubious light. By night, the flare of the coal-gas jet distorted his father, Reb Monash, and his own feet on the fender, and the sofa into things of blurred, awkward lines.

It must be confessed that Reb Monash Massel was not wholly unconscious of his power to produce this atmosphere where terrible and impalpable presences flowed from his lips in a shadowy rout. Sabres flashing! Hilarious ponderous blasphemies tangled in the beards of Kossacken storming onward and away!

"You've heard me talk of Mendel, the Red One? No, not the shoemaker, the clerk! It was when a clerk he was, in the woods! They were cutting the Posne firs. They knew he was a Jew, the wood-cutters, and they put their heads together. Can one be a Jew without stabbing the goyishke eyes, eh? He was working very late one night; it was near the end of the month and he had all his accounts to make up. Well, he was bending over his papers very busy, and it was late, after midnight. There were owls hooting and two or three mad dogs in the woods crying now and again. It was very miserable, but he was bent over his figures. Above his head the air sang suddenly. He lifted his head and a knife he saw, quivering in the log wall beyond him, to his left. The window on his right was wide open because it was a sultry night. He got up quietly and closed the window, then took the knife out to give back to its owner next day. He was settling down to his work again when his eye was caught by something gleaming in the opposite wall. They were very badly built log cottages, these, pulled down as soon as the trees in that part of the forest were cleared. Badly built, big chinks between the logs. It was the gleam of a gun pointing at him through a chink...."

Somebody uttered a sharp cry. Philip on the fender-stool sat with the points of his elbows striking into his thighs, his chin pressed down into the palms of his hands. A burning coke exploded in the fire and a fragment jumped out on the mat. Mrs. Massel stooped to it and swiftly, with unprotected hands, threw it back into the fire.

"It's already a long time ago," said Reb Monash. "I wasn't fifteen yet. I wasn't married. It's all over now, it's all over. Besides," he went on comfortably, at the risk of disturbing the atmosphere he had created by his subtle modulations of tone, his pauses, his notes of drawn tension, "besides, they'll all be frying in hell, the wood-cutters, one and all! What will you?"

A slight murmur of satisfaction went round among the women. The assurance coming from so authoritative a source as Reb Monash himself, no one could doubt that the wood-cutters had long ago met their deserts and were still adequately enduring them.

"_Nu tatte_, what about Mendel, the Red One?" This from Philip in an anxious quaver.

Reb Monash looked round and down on Philip, a significant droop in his eyelids, his lips tightening a little.

"_Schweig_," he said. "Silence! is thy tatte running away?"

"Hush!" Mrs. Massel echoed, very quietly, from her corner of the sofa.

Reb Monash could not resist the temptation of taking out one of his Silver Virginia cigarettes, deliberately setting it in his mouthpiece, lighting it, and drawing smoke two or three times contemplatively.

Somebody's foot tapped in a corner. He resumed. "_Yah_, a gun pointing at him through a chink. What was there to do, I ask you? If they fired--well, they fired, and he was dead. If they didn't fire, he was alive. And if a man's alive, a man must live. Not so? So he took his quill in his hand again ... and he heard a little noise in the wall behind him. He looked round. Another gun. There, held by unseen hands in the night. Another gun. Pointing at him. Two guns pointing at him. He turned round to his table again. A Jew's not a Jew for nothing. He said a few blessings. Thou hearest, Feivel?" turning to Philip.

Philip swallowed a lump in his throat fearfully. He was afraid to answer. It was perhaps one of those rhetorical questions to which an answer was somehow, mysteriously, an offence. He thrust his head deeper into his hands and blinked.

"He said a few blessings," Reb Monash repeated, to press the moral home upon his listeners. "Well, what will you? He was a good clerk, very neat. And while the minutes in his clock were ticking as slowly as the years during the Time of Bondage, his figures he brought over from column to column. When came the first sign of morning so that the lamp shone less strongly on the two guns in the walls there, pointed at his heart," these last words with slow emphasis and repeated, "pointed at his heart--he dipped his head and hands into his bowl of water, took out his tallus and his tephilim; and when he was passing the strap round his arm, he heard very faintly the guns withdrawn through the chinks in the walls. But he could hear no feet creeping away. Besides, he was davenning; how could he listen to anything else? It's only God you must think about when you're davenning, no?

"He finished when it was already day in his hut. His beard--it was a small beard, only a young man's beard--was grey, like the snow in Angel Street. He did his accounts so well, did Mendel, the Red One--they always called him the Red One, even after that night, and strangers wondered why Red One--so well, that the merchant he worked for increased his wages by a rouble a month soon after. Oh, a Russia it was! What say you?"

By this time Mrs. Levine, from Number Seven, was soaked in tears, her face, her blouse, and even the flour on her apron was streaky and damp. She had come in half-way through, but any anecdote, sad or merry, or merely a parable to illustrate a point of law, invariably reduced her to tears.

"_Nu, nu!_" said Reb Monash, "over a year in Jerusalem!" which was a signal that no further ramification was to be expected from that anecdote, and moreover, that it might not be unwise for Mrs. Massel to drop her knitting and prepare for him a tumblerful of tea and lemon, with a lump of sugar--not too much lemon, for these were hard times; not like Russia, where people hung round your neck to beg the privilege from you of staying with them as a guest for two months, three months, as long as you liked. Well, that was Russia, but what could you expect from England? Pah! Yidishkeit going to the dogs! Young men he'd seen with his own eyes shamelessly boarding those new-fangled electric tramcars on a Shabbos! Which involved a double offence; not only riding but also carrying money in their pockets to pay for this dissipation--money on Shabbos!

So it seemed, Philip was fitfully made aware, that there were aspects of this Russian Babylon which compared very favourably with the situation in England, or, more precisely, in the drab Northern city of Doomington, where Philip first saw the light, seven years before; or, perhaps, to be accurate, in Angel Street, where the wire factory at one end and the grocer's shop at the other were the limits of his confident experience. Beyond Moishele's shop ("grocer's" shop only for convenience, seeing that his stock-in-trade extended from sewing-machines to fish and beetroot), Doomington Road extended its sonorous length, where, sole oases in this desert of terror, Philip recognized the Bridgeway Elementary School and the Polish Synagogue, the Polisher Shool.

It was not wholly that the young scions of Judæa in Russia were so far from committing definite sins against God and Man that their days were a positive round of gratuitous holiness. Much as Philip tried dutifully to rejoice with his father over this sanctity of young Russian Jewry, even when Reb Monash significantly expatiated on the talents of young gentlemen only seven years old who steered their own vessels through the dark seas of Kaballah--it was not this piety which set Philip brooding.

The landscape which his elders painted, unconsciously and incidentally, as a background to their memories, filled his mind with inchoate sequences of pictures. To the Jewish mind there is only one landscape which purely for its own sake arrests the mind and the heart. Each detail of Jordan or Lebanon is impressed centuries too deep for its deletion under snow or dissolution under fire. Plateau of Spain, the turbid flow of Volga, the squalid nightmare of Doomington Road, are matters of indifference to the Judaic protagonists while the great drama develops along its austere and shoddy ways towards some dénouement far beyond the invisible hills. To Reb Monash the Orthodox Greek Church he had known at home and from which his eyes turned bitterly away, whence the black-hearted pappas came forth and, on seeing Reb Monash, grimaced and bit his lips, had imperceptibly become the Baptist Missionary Chapel at the corner of Travers Row, whence the Rev. Wilberforce Wilkinson emerged from time to time, bestowing on every Reb Monash or Philip Massel who came that way a smile beatific with missionary invitation.

But it was a matter of much concern to Philip that the Dniester which flowed beyond the pear-orchards (pear-orchards! he tried wistfully to recreate them spreading their splendid snows beyond the kitchen wallpaper) was clean as--clean as the water in the scullery tap. Which seemed mythological. Philip's acquaintance with rivers was limited to the River Mitchen that flowed on the further side of the wire factory and parallel with Doomington Road. The river stank--literally and abundantly. When it rose after the spring floods of two years ago, the cellars of Angel Street were a wash of noisome and greasy waters.

"It happened in the centre of a forest..." said one. "Trees--the sun never got through their leaves in summer..." said another. "Yes, she had her own vines and fig trees...." "... Corn, barley, all rotten in the rains..." "... and after that, to finish them, they had five haystacks burned to the ground;" "the orchard by the river, near the Woman's Pool ..." they said to each other.

It was little more than words to Philip. It seemed illogical that there should be a river, which, being a river, did not stink. Fruit could hardly be dissociated from the baskets and trays at Moishele's shop. True, there were unconvincing pictures of fruit trees in the classroom at school, but they lent only a feeble corroboration.