The Apprentices

by Leon Garfield

  “What do you know about Gawd? Motherin’ Sunday, is it? More like Murderin’ Sunday! Look at ’im, I say, standin’ there with ’is fancy girl! And ’er as filthy as a rubbish ’eap!”

  Gully saw his girl shudder and her face twist up in pain.

  “Shut your mouth!” he shouted. “Shut your ’orrible mouth!”

  “Gully, Gully . . . please!” moaned Miss LaSalle, swaying like a flame about to go out.

  “I told you, I ain’t your ma no more!”

  “Then good riddance!”

  “I ’ate you for your snaky pride!”

  “And I ’ate you for everythin’ else! I ’ate this place and I ’ate this Yard—”

  “Labour-in-Vain Yard!” screamed Mrs. Gully in terrible triumph. “And labour in vain it was to bring you into the world!”

  “And labour in vain it’s been to live in it!” howled Gully, and smashed down the plate he’d still been holding.

  Then the sky fell down—or so it seemed. There came a violent crash from the workroom that shook the whole house! It was followed by a sharp grunt of pain.

  “It’s ’im,” muttered Mrs. Gully, recovering herself a little and panting heavily.

  “What’s ’e done now?”

  “Knocked something over. Just like ’im.”

  There came now from the workroom a moan of intolerable agony.

  “Christ!” said Gully. “’E’s ’urt ’imself.”

  “I’ll go—” began Gully’s girl, for neither the mother nor the son seemed able to move.

  Gully stared at her in bewilderment, then he turned back to his ma. The look that passed between them was stripped of all its secrecy now. Together they rushed to the workroom door.

  “Can’t do nothing right, can ’e!” cried Mrs. Gully.

  “And on a Sunday, too!” screeched Gully, dragging open the door so wildly that the thin partition shook like the walls of Jericho.

  The old familiar smell came rushing out and engulfed the parlour like a great warm garment. Gully and his ma went into the dark room, where a single candle burned on the cobbler’s bench and cast a subdued radiance on the racks of worn tools.

  Shadowy boots crowded the shelves round the walls, and a beggar’s host of them stood patiently in a corner of the floor, as if listening to a sermon. Wrinkled and broken, they reeked horribly, with their uppers displaying every deformity of leather, reflecting the ways in which men and women walked the world. The cobbler’s workroom was like a dim graveyard of feet, awaiting the resurrection of soles.

  The old man himself was lying on the floor and crying with pain. Somehow the heavy cobbler’s last had fallen over and crushed his naked, bunioned foot.

  “’E must ’ave done it ’imself!” wailed Gully, and knelt beside the old journeyman.

  “Pull it off, pull it off!” urged Mrs. Gully, crouching beside her son and holding onto his sleeve.

  Very gently, Gully lifted up the last, and his ma moved the candle to examine the injured foot. It was a frightful bruised and bloody sight; the toes had been crushed, and the old man moaned and moaned.

  “Bring some warm water!” called out Mrs. Gully. “From the tea.”

  Miss LaSalle ran to fetch the jug and the cleanest rag from among her scattered belongings. Gully took them and, with great care and tenderness, began to wash the blood from the old man’s foot.

  “Thank you . . . thank you,” he mumbled, and, looking up at Gully’s girl, smiled painfully. “And you too, miss.”

  “Do it—do it ’urt much?” asked Mrs. Gully, nervously patting the old man’s hand.

  “Not too bad . . . not now you’re all ’ere.”

  “’Ow did it ’appen?”

  “I got frightened with all that shoutin’. And when I ’eard a plate breakin’. . . .”

  “It weren’t nothing, reely. It weren’t anything worth men-shunning.”

  “Reely?”

  “On me honour. Ain’t that so, Gully, dear?”

  Mrs. Gully looked at her son. They both nodded earnestly and smiled. The old man seemed reassured.

  “I like what ’e brung you for this Motherin’ Sunday,” he mumbled, twisting his head and peering about him.

  “Oh, that,” said Mrs. Gully uncomfortably. “It weren’t nothing, reely.”

  “Oh, but it were!” He was looking now at Gully’s girl, and his watery eyes were blinking as if before too bright a light. “I never see’d a present so pretty. And French, too. You made a good choice, Gully. Your ma and me is reely proud!”

  “It—it’s me pa,” said Gully softly, as if his words might have blown out the candle. “Miss LaSalle, this ’ere is Mr. Gully. Me pa.”

  As he spoke, a limitless happiness suddenly flooded Gully’s soul. The weight he’d lifted from his father’s foot was as thistledown beside the weight he’d lifted from himself. He wanted to dance and sing; he wanted to rush out into Labour-in-Vain Yard and shout his good news to the sun and sky. He wanted to embrace and kiss everyone, even perfect strangers who might be passing up and down Fish Hill!

  But he had to content himself with reaching out for Miss LaSalle’s hand and explaining, “Me pa, ’ere, mends soles, y’know. We’re only in a small way, but we’re a ’appy little family, reely.”

  He felt his girl’s grip answer his own and squeeze and squeeze till it seemed she’d never let go. Then Mrs. Joaker managed to edge her way into the room, and the candle flame flickered so that all the boots and shoes seemed to dance for the old cobbler and his wife.

  “I’d best bandage up ’is foot,” said Mrs. Gully with a touch of her old gentility. “It do look a ugly mess!”

  “Oh, no!” put in Mrs. Joaker, who had been pew opener at the church in Hanover Square. “’Ow beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace!”

  The old cobbler nodded and smiled with rare contentment. . . .

  THE FOOL

  “BUNTING! BUNTING, MY own dearest darling!”

  Bunting, taking down the shutters of Israels’, the clockmaker’s in Carter Lane, slowly looked up to the first-floor window for Rachel, his cousin and latest love.

  “April Fool!” screeched Rachel, a lovely, dark-eyed girl, and emptied a jug of dirty water down on his upturned face.

  Mr. Israels, who was Bunting’s uncle, stared through the window at his sodden apprentice.

  “It don’t take April the First to make such a fool!” he muttered. He knew he ought to have gone upstairs and reproached his daughter, but he really couldn’t find it in his heart to blame her.

  Although Bunting had been in the business for only a year, he had already done enough damage for a lifetime; and Mr. Israels, who rarely spoke Yiddish, felt himself driven to it.

  “Schlemiel!” he said as Bunting lumbered inside the shop and leaned the shutters against the wall in such a way that they fell over almost at once. It was really the only expression that summed up the extraordinary mixture of clumsiness and beaming stupidity that was his sister’s child.

  Bunting picked up the shutters and went to change his shirt and wash his face.

  “Schlemiel!” repeated Mr. Israels as he heard his nephew’s large feet clump into the workshop. If Bunting hadn’t been his sister’s child—his own flesh and blood—he’d have thrown him out long ago; as it was, he could only compress his lips and put up with the great blundering cuckoo among his clocks. It was a bitterness to the master clockmaster that Time, with its beautiful, ticking precision, should have Bunting muddling it.

  But today was the Eve of Passover and not really the time for disagreeable thoughts. The shop would be shut for two days, and that night there would be the cheerful family festival to celebrate the Exodus from Egypt with wine and song and Mrs. Israels’ stuffed carp. His lovely daughter, Rachel, would be sitting up till late in her new dress, and being the youngest at table, she’d be asking the Four Questions in her uncertain Hebrew, and everyone would smile and laugh and congratulate her. It was a pleasure for which the master clo
ckmaker could scarcely wait.

  Last year, he recollected, with a slight frown, as a favour to his sister, Bunting had asked the Questions; and there was a large wine stain on the Passover cloth to mark where he’d sat. The boy’s mother had offered to buy a new cloth, but Mrs. Israels had said, “No—no! It was an accident!” and Mrs. Bunting had taken her at her word and done nothing.

  Mr. Israels struggled to put from his mind the undeniable fact that his own sister was a mean and selfish woman, who, in addition to everything else, had saddled him with the biggest idiot it had ever been his misfortune to come across . . . in a lifetime of trading.

  Bunting, on the other hand, regarded his uncle with enormous admiration and respect. The old boy was a wizard with wheels and was, moreover, the father of the lovely Rachel. . . .

  Unable to find a clean shirt, Bunting put the dirty one on again, inside out, and sat down to collect his soaked and shaken thoughts.

  He scratched his head and sighed. It wasn’t as though he didn’t think at all; it was just that he thought slowly. Often, he knew, he was having quite large thoughts, but there never seemed time to consider more than a piece of them. Everything went past so quickly, and it was next week before he’d finished digesting yesterday.

  A tree might have thought as Bunting thought, as he sat, rooted in the clockmaker’s workshop, while round about, the multitudinous tread of minutes and seconds as they tramped and scampered round the hanging clock faces tried to tell him that time was passing by.

  At length he stood up and stared into a clock glass, seeing not the evidence of flying minutes, but his own unchanging, amiable face. He smoothed down his hair and reflected ruefully on how pleasant it would have been to be out and about with the beautiful Rachel, who was the very brightest ornament of the spring; instead, alas! he was shut up in a ticking factory with springs of a very different nature—springs that snapped and stung like vipers whenever he so much as touched them.

  He sucked his fingers and dreamed of being a sailor, with a Rachel in every port; but here he was, a clockmaker’s apprentice with no time for dalliance but between sunset and ten o’clock of a Saturday night.

  It wasn’t so bad in the winter, when the sun set early; but in spring and summer—the very seasons for love—the sun set cruelly late, and his time out was cut down to a shred.

  Saturday after Saturday he’d pleaded with his uncle, but it was out of Mr. Israels’ hands. Saturday was the Sabbath day until the sun set, and if the Almighty saw fit to shorten Bunting’s night out in the warm weather, then the Almighty knew what He was about.

  “Listen to me, Bunting,” Mr. Israels had said. “In dealings between man and man, time goes by the clock; but in dealings between man and the Almighty, time goes by the sun. So please don’t argue.”

  Bunting buttoned up his coat and went outside again to clean the shop window where the dirty water had splashed. Cautiously he looked up.

  “Rachel!”

  She came to the window and looked out. This time she threw down only the light of her eyes. Bunting surveyed her and marvelled. Time had sped by so quickly. Only last year she’d been a skinny nothing; now she bloomed like the Rose of Sharon. Eagerly he looked forward to sitting next to her at the table that night; he imagined holding her hand under cover of the cloth, and perhaps—who knew?—after several glasses of Passover wine, she’d let him kiss her! He waved up to her with a flourish, as if he’d doffed a large feathered hat, and bowed. His bottom butted a passerby.

  “Schlemiel!” said Rachel, and laughed like tinsel.

  Bunting apologized to the basket woman he’d knocked over and helped her gather her scattered wares; then he resumed wiping the window and whistling the latest street song but one.

  He wasn’t really downhearted by Rachel’s treatment; he felt that she was just a little quicker than he was. Sooner or later he’d catch up with her, and with the world in general. . . .

  “Time for sale! Time for sale!”

  Bunting jumped as the high-pitched, nasal voice, floating down Carter Lane, broke so aptly into the pattern of his thoughts.

  He looked eastwards and saw that an ancient, bearded man in a tall black hat was beating his way against the hurrying crowds and sometimes helping his progress with a stout, knobby stick.

  It was not Father Time, but old Levy, wearing his long blue coat that flapped open to display a heavy cluster of watch seals dangling from under his crumpled velvet waistcoat. Behind him came his lame boy, with a large mahogany cupboard case strapped to his back. They were at once a pathetic and disturbing sight.

  Old Levy bought and sold watches in the streets of most of the towns in the kingdom, and nobody knew for certain how much money he was worth. It was thought to be a great deal, for the old fellow never parted with anything for nothing—not even the time of day. When he did business, which he began by unlocking and opening his boy’s cupboard case to display his stock of timepieces, it was seen that every watch told a different time; you had to buy one to find out what was the right time.

  “Buy a watch!” wailed old Levy. “Be the master of your time!”

  Rachel came to the window again—as did daughters up and down the street, till fair heads mingled with the shop signs like blossoms among the creaking, swinging leaves. Handkerchiefs fluttered and shrill voices called for their Toms, Dicks, and Harrys to hurry outside, for old Levy sometimes had trinkets from Birmingham, cheap enough for apprentices to tempt their masters’ daughters with—and since the beginning of time, girls have loved to yield to tempters. . . .

  “Good morning, Mr. Levy!” called out Bunting, bursting to distinguish himself upon this shining April morning, with all the world looking down.

  “Morning—evening? Who knows for certain till they buy a watch?” said old Levy cunningly.

  He tottered up to the clockmaker’s shop and observed with interest the metal scroll upon the doorpost that denoted a Jewish home and, therefore, a friend in Egypt.

  “All right. It’s morning. That much I’ll give you. And maybe it is a good morning for you. You’ve got your health and strength and are looking forward to a Passover night with singing and wine and stuffed fish. But I’m an old, old man, and my boy here is lame. The Almighty, in His wisdom, has made one of his legs shorter than the other.”

  “But He’s made the other one longer!” piped up the boy with a brightly martyred smile.

  “Schnorrers!” muttered Mr. Israels, who was watching through the window. Again he was driven into Yiddish; for what else described the disagreeable mixture of wheedling, whining, and ingratiating begging that was old Levy and his boy? Besides, he felt it an impertinence for the old wretch to be hawking his wares outside a craftsman’s shop. It implied a kinship. . . .

  “Careful, Mr. Levy, sir!” cried Bunting, winking up at Rachel. “Your shoelace is undone!”

  “My shoe?” exclaimed Levy, and bent his withered back to examine his feet.

  “April Fool!” shouted Bunting triumphantly, and lumbered out of range of the knobby stick.

  But old Levy made no attempt to raise his weapon. He remained bent almost double. He groaned in agony and slowly fell to the ground, flapping out his coat like a damaged bird.

  Bunting looked on; he was still grinning triumphantly. Everything had happened so quickly that he was still with his joke, even though calamity had overwhelmed it.

  “My back! My chest . . . my heart!” moaned old Levy. “I can’t move. . . . Moses, my boy, help me! Carry me inside! It—it’s the Almighty’s will . . . and God be thanked that it should happen outside a Jewish house! At least I can die among Jews . . . and on the Passover! Moses, Moses . . . go to the synagogue in Magpie Alley! Fetch the rabbi. . . .”

  The boy Moses, who was blessed with one of those extraordinarily transparent and beautiful faces often seen among cripples, hopped about in piteous anxiety, begging someone to free him from his rattling mahogany burden so that he might run, as fast as his lame legs would carry him, to Mag
pie Alley.

  A crowd quickly gathered round the moaning old man, and there were exclamations of, “Shame!” and, “Poor old devil!” and the luckless Bunting found himself being pushed and buffetted and roundly abused. He didn’t know what to do until Mr. Israels came out of the shop, called him a schlemiel, and sent him off to Magpie Alley, as lame Moses would have taken all day.

  Only too thankful to be removed from the disaster he’d brought about, Bunting lumbered off and ran all the way to Magpie Alley, where the rabbi lived at the back of the synagogue.

  He thumped and thundered till the door was answered, and the rabbi, a sensible man, told him to come in and sit down and get his breath back, as it was impossible to understand what he wanted. So Bunting sat down on a chair in the hallway and explained more slowly. The rabbi listened and nodded.

  “So it’s that schnorrer Levy,” he said. His voice and manner seemed altogether more composed than Bunting felt the extreme urgency of the situation required.

  “Do you know, my boy,” he went on, observing Bunting’s anxiety, “why tonight’s festival is called the Passover? It’s because on this night the children of Israel in Egypt were commanded by the Almighty to smear their doorposts with the blood of the paschal lamb so that the angel of death would pass them over as he smote the first-born of the Egyptians. It was the tenth plague. Well, Levy is the eleventh plague. And the Almighty, blessed be His name, has not told us to this day what we must smear on our doorposts so that the schnorrer might pass us over!”

  But the rabbi had been too subtle, and Bunting’s anxiety was increasing visibly.

  “Do you think you could hurry, sir?” he said.

  The rabbi looked at him closely and framed the word “Schlemiel!” Nevertheless, he put on his coat and went with the boy to Carter Lane. After all, he thought to himself, quickening his pace, old Levy was more than ninety, and it was just possible that his hour had struck. On the other hand, he thought, slowing down a little, old Levy had had mortal illnesses before, and they always tended to strike him down on feast days outside a Jewish home. It was really rather fortunate that the two schnorrers hadn’t got as far as Magpie Alley. . . .