She had produced in this crisis of their wretched fortunes a little sacred hoard, accumulated with God knows how much care and in what silence. On that, dole by dole, they lived; on that, of which no mortal except Aunt Reba herself knew the place or the amount, she still maintained the tiny household, doing everything herself. She was determined that Aaron should be worthy of his father, and he had been designed for the same great office, in spite of the same great poverty… It was her glory, and was already beginning to be his, that it should be so.
Aaron at thirteen years old already showed aptitudes excelling even in that keen, restricted, intelligent, fearful world of his, surrounded everywhere by hatred, anger and contempt. His master praised him, comparing his youth to that of the elders of story. It seemed, as the lad grew in repute and stature, as though something had been saved. All crashed: a mob rose, murderous against the Jews. It had risen, at first, in a moment of blind passion and popular rising against the only few well-to-do in that ghetto, money-lenders to whom too many of the Gentiles of that town were bound. They escaped unhurt, but the wretched community was laid waste. The poor houses were sacked, the Synagogue looted of its pathetic treasured ornaments, and its building burned, while the flames lit the torrent of a hurried, driven, terrified exodus, as they lit the maimed and the dead of that blind and cruel fury.
In that dreadful night Aunt Reba had saved the boys. She got them to Riga, by the offices of one of her people whom she there knew; she found some cranny for her and for them in an outgoing ship. A good part of the little hoard had to go, for the refugees were bled white by the Swedish captain of the craft. After three days of slow steaming through the calm Baltic (it was still bitterly cold, though the ice had gone) and three more days of tossing in the fury of the North Sea gales, this human wreckage of three, the child, the boy, and the old woman, had come to London, and had there found, as such will always find through the intense patriotism of that people, shelter at least, and the first necessities of food. But Aunt Reba still paid, and owed no man a penny.
Through such gates had it been that Aaron Levina in his fourteenth year entered manhood.
He began his new life by being taken on, without wage for his keep and for learning of the trade, by an employer from among his own people, a childless old man who kept a little shop in the heart of Whitechapel. It was a little shop which bought or sold anything that came to hand, things not grand enough to be called curiosities, still less to be called antiques—just what the thrifty, bent, grizzled, spectacled old man, Aaron’s employer, could get hold of by keen judgement and could hold for profit. There was clothing; there were, occasionally, second-hand fittings of boats, compasses, cases of instruments, lengths of chain, all manner of them; there were ornaments too, some of them strange and foreign, some few of gold in an outlandish make. Many of tarnished silver, and now and then would pass through his hands some cheaper gem. And for Gentiles of an evening at the back of the shop upon the quiet there would be small advances (for the master had no licence for such a trade, but small advances there would be) and interest taken, and taken heavily and even harshly—but from the Gentiles only. The law was strictly observed, and where his own people were concerned, his brethren and Aaron’s, he would no more have charged usury than he would have robbed them. For it is forbidden. And when the old man heard the names of rich men who were of his own kind and who like himself should have kept the law, but who broke it from greed, and who despoiled even those of the sacred blood, he spat by way of contempt and hatred.
From very early morning till very late at night the boy Aaron slaved silently—but always with a hidden anger in his heart against the outer world. He picked up English rapidly, reading in every moment of time he could snatch from the very brief free hours of his nights, and he earned unaided from such efforts as he deserved to earn, deserving as had his father before him through an unswerving tenacity. For the childless man whom he served, finding it more and more necessary, took him in to the petty business, until at last, when he had been but four years in London, he was already holding his own among his comrades, and could almost pass as one who had been born in the security of that haven which his people find among the English. The business began to prosper in its tiny way, as it could not but prosper in such tireless hands as were young Aaron Levina’s, even in his ‘teens. Aunt Reba, very old when she had suffered that dreadful trial, and now beginning to fail, could be looked after. Aaron could now provide her with small luxuries. He could pay for a little help from neighbours.
But what was a dearer thing to Aaron’s heart, what was his only consolation and his one joy in those beginnings of a most humble prosperity, after such bitter memories, was the nurturing of the child his brother.
That dreadful day and night of the Pogrom had both seared and branded him. It had seared him so that he could love but very few. It had branded him with the mark, as it were, of a vocation; a special duty to remain proud of his blood and hostile to all other. It had filled him with a hatred beyond that of his kin for the brutish and abominable Goyim, who do these hellish evils without cause. His contempt for the intelligence of those outside the law and the Covenant was not religious; though exact in observance, religion was not his motive. It was experience. He knew them for what they were. But that stupidity of theirs did not excuse their wickedness.
The horrid cruelty which had stabbed his soul in its first youth was more vivid but not less effective than the continual sneers, the frequent insults, which even when not directed at himself were the lot of his people. If such feelings were concealed among the wealthier companions of his later life it was from cowardice—he could swear—not from charity.
Even here in London, safe, he never forgot what a burden some inexplicable enmity against his people laid upon him and his.
So formed, so he remained, cast in that mould; and all his high talents—they were, in their way, genius— all his iron tenacity, were conditioned by this mood. The vast fortune which he was to acquire changed him not a whit. He owed it to himself and to his blood to keep that spirit unswerving; in the agony of his isolated soul all its affection, all its intensity, was focused upon the little brother.
On that brother his whole being was concentrated. It was that brother, he thought, who had really inherited his father’s spirit. And the boy was beginning to pass for learned. But not in the learning which his father had known; rather the learning of the latest kind; figures, for their own sake, measurements. A little later in the evening classes of the University he eagerly began to get the beginnings of science.
When, later, the elder brother saw how the younger advanced in these things and was made for them, he triumphed. Glory was coming to the Levinas. And with that glory as an end, and with the good of the child as the absorbing passion, he still toiled unceasingly. It was for this that he earned—though the occupation was native to him and welcome enough—a name for close dealing beyond his fellows. It was well for him that he could earn that name, for it was a promise of what was to come.
When the old master died Aaron Levina was in his twenty-fourth year; and-Jacob, at seventeen, getting his first little triumphs of praise from his masters, hearing that one of these days he would be a great physicist, inventing things, discovering things, probing, theorizing, and all the rest of it.
The business still prospered. Aaron would not dream of letting Jacob work in it. He hired an assistant, a Gentile, whom he drove in blinkers and drove hard. He hired another assistant and took the lower part of the house next door, and doubled the shop. So things stood when old Aunt Reba died in her turn, very old and at peace.
A year or two passed. Aaron Levina was doing more, elsewhere, in some mysterious fashion, in some office which he visited an hour or two on every day but the Sabbath, and wherein he was closeted at accounts during all the first day of the week, when the quiet of the Gentile holiday gave him full leisure. He was buying and selling other things than flotsam and jetsam. It had begun with fragments of the pr
ecious metals, and those occasional gems. It had gone on to larger operations.
Then it was that there befell that which was to bring him into permanent though distant relation with Wilfrid Halterton.
Young Jacob’s school was the big County School building on the westward side of the Mile End Road. The class was over; rather late, he was crossing the big street under the glare of the lamps, upon his way home to his brother, when that short sight of his and that nervous manner betrayed him. He did not see the policeman’s arm lowered, he went forward, hesitated just that fraction of a second which is fatal, and was hit. The near mudguard of a big car had caught him and spun him forward into the road, where he lay huddled in a heap, knowing nothing.
The brakes shrieked, the door of the car was impulsively flung open, and there leaped out a young man, very tall, eager in manner, most anxious and alarmed and disturbed, who rushed forward in his fine evening clothes and big fur coat, into the cold and through the mud. He went down on one knee beside the boy, still lying motionless, while a crowd gathered, and two policemen forced their way through it.
The young man who had thus jumped out in his solicitude had been Wilfrid Halterton, the Wilfrid Halterton of all those years ago, those years when his family was at its wealthiest. He was not yet dreaming of politics, still up at the University, and going back in his car on that Friday night to rejoin his father in Essex after a dinner with his friends in London.
The policemen were taking notes, the boy’s comrades, many of them of his own kind, were eagerly volunteering information. Young Halterton, uncertain, bewildered, full of compassion, wondering what to do, was told by the policemen that an ambulance was coming; they told him also whither the maimed child would be taken, to the London Hospital. At the same time he heard from one of the scholars who was more voluble than the rest in his eagerness to inform where the child’s brother, Aaron Levina, lived.
Young Halterton was shocked and pitiful beyond words. He could not dream of going on that night at all. He had felt a wave of relief on hearing that this lad lived; but at the first low groan his heart was torn. I must excuse him. His emotion may sound exaggerated; but remember that Halterton was then very young, and had a generous feeling of shame, as though his wealth were in some way to blame for the tragedy his car had caused among these poor people.
He saw the poor boy’s face, twisted with pain in the glare of the arc-lamp, the clear-cut Sephardim face which meant nothing to him of race—he was ignorant of these things; the large, dark eyes opened for a moment and then closed again. He burned to act and save. How to act he knew not. He had to make up his mind; and after some seconds of that shilly-shallying that was native to him he got something of a plan.
“Look here, Roberts,” he said to the chauffeur, “I can’t go on. I must stay here and see after this. I shall stand by this lad; I must do all I can.” Then, turning to the policemen, he said: “I was on my way to my father’s house, down in Essex. I must let him know. I must stand by here, too, I must do all I can. What?”
The policeman was taking the number of the car. The ambulance had arrived.
“That’s all right, sir,” he said. “You send your man to telephone, and give me your name, and all that. My colleague’ll go with your man, and then we can send him on.”
“Thank you,” said Halterton, most grateful for the leave. It helped him to think—but as he looked at the huddled figure on the stretcher his heart bled.
“Roberts,” he said, “will you go with the officer, and ring up my father? Tell him what’s happened. Then you’d better go on home, and I’ll find my own way down somehow to-morrow. Say I’ll telephone him again myself in an hour or so. Only when you’ve telephoned you go on home with the car.”
And so it was. And young Wilfrid Halterton tramped with the policemen, following the ambulance to the hospital, and there spent an hour or more, making sure that all was attended to, and hugely relieved to know that the boy now knew where he was and could speak a word or two, feebly; still more relieved was he to hear, as he did after waiting long enough, that there was no immediate danger—though it was grave.
“If I were you, sir,” said one of the policemen, “I’d look up Mr. Levina in the ‘phone book and let him know.”
But though there was a whole regiment of Levine derivatives in the telephone book, this particular Levina was not there. Perhaps there was some mistake. Anyhow, now that he was reassured he must go and find the brother.
But there was no necessity. Others had been before him. A little knot of the wounded lad’s competitors and fellow scholars all volubly pressed round Wilfrid Halterton as he strode, long-legged, through the narrow streets. They brought him to the door of the main shop and living house, where he banged loudly. The place was shut up, but the assistant had been left on guard. Aaron Levina had gone out to see a client.
“I’ll wait for him,” said Wilfrid, sitting down by the light of one naked bulb, amid the mass of heaped incongruous things. The group which had followed him hung about in the street outside.
Where that client of Levina’s was no one knew. Halterton waited and waited. At last he asked for a sheet of paper and an envelope, and he wrote these words out of his full heart:
“MY DEAR SIR,
“I am exceedingly sorry to tell you that my motorcar, passing the Council School in the Mile End Road this evening, knocked down a young gentleman, who, I find, is your brother. I am waiting here to see you, and am most anxious to do so. I wanted you to have the news first from me, and I want to be able to assure you personally that he is in no danger. They assured me of that. But I am afraid the accident is grave.
“It is not a very easy thing to write, but I do beg you to believe me when I say that I am going to do everything I can—everything in my power—everything. It is a terrible business. Believe me, I will do everything; only tell me what should be done and I am wholly at your disposal. I cannot bear to think of the boy’s drawn face as I saw it. It is still with me.
“Do come as soon as you can. They are going to try and find you, and I shall wait here until you do.”
He sent the note off with a bevy from those outside to search for Aaron, and one well-feed messenger to bear the envelope, and wait Wilfrid Halterton did. He waited and waited. An hour passed and more than an hour. But the reason he was kept waiting was not that Levina could not be found; Levina had been found, but upon hearing the news he had dashed off to the hospital, and he was there now, protesting, insisting, crying over Jacob, his little Jacob, and learning at first confusedly, then more clearly when he questioned them, what had happened.
In the midst of his grief he was filled with a great bitterness. Evil was upon him. Evil was always upon him, and had been upon him and his, through these accursed outer people; evil coming from their malice, or their greed or their spite, or their indifference or their contempt. The rich Gentile would pay, of course; there would be damages, of course; but what solace was that? It would be accursed money, as the man himself was … there his mind halted. Would to God the thing had never happened! The child would be a cripple now, and where were all those dreams?
They had got him into a little bare room of the hospital, a little waiting-room, apart. He asked to be left alone. And sitting there on the one chair of the place, he sobbed in agony. Then after the exhaustion of this he bethought him of the note and opened it. And as he read it there was a struggle in his mind.
He was not unacquainted with goodness, but goodness meant for him the half-faded memory of his father, Aunt Reba, the dead man who had left him the business, and—very much less—one or two acquaintances, hardly friends. The world was not good. Men were not good. Least of all were the Goyim good. And little he cared whether they were good or no.
Then he read the note again. It was genuine enough. He knew men, and he knew it was genuine enough. Well, he must go and see this fellow.
The streets were deserted now. No little crowd accompanied him as he hurried back to the two
shops. He put the key in the door. Halterton stood up at once, his tall, thin frame somewhat too big for the place.
“Mr. Levina?” he said.
“That’s my name,” said Levina in a curt voice.
“Mr. Levina, I’ve told you what I could in that note—you got my note?”
“Yes,” still briefly, and still in that curt voice.
“Mr. Levina, you will not be offended, I know, if I do something which I want to do. You won’t mind my doing it?”
Young Mr. Halterton meant well, and because as yet he was unstained by the world usually did things wrong.
“What’s your name?” rapped out Levina.
“Halterton—Wilfrid Halterton. I was on my way to my father’s place in Essex—Chilham, you know. That’s where my father lives. I was on my way down there—that’s why it happened.”
“Sit down, Mr. Halterton,” said Levina, taking a chair himself. Though he was fully master of himself, yet he was still shaken. He could not be as angry as he was, the tall man opposite to him seemed too much of a fool for that; but there was much anger in him still.
“You won’t mind my going and seeing your brother when I’m allowed to? I asked the hours. I could ask after him to-morrow, anyhow.”
The Postmaster General Page 11