Stories by English Authors: London Part 12

"But she halts on the left leg," cried Leibel, exasperated.

"_Gott in Himmel!_ Do you mean to say you do not see what an advantage it is to have a wife unable to accompany you in all your goings?"

Leibel lost patience.

"Why, the girl is a hunchback!" he protested, furiously.

"My dear Leibel," said the marriage broker, deprecatingly shrugging his shoulders and spreading out his palms, "you can't expect perfection!"

Nevertheless Leibel persisted in his unreasonable att.i.tude. He accused Sugarman of wasting his time, of making a fool of him.

"A fool of you!" echoed the Shadchan, indignantly, "when I give you a chance of a boot and shoe manufacturer's daughter? You will make a fool of yourself if you refuse. I dare say her dowry would be enough to set you up as a master tailor. At present you are compelled to slave away as a cutter for thirty s.h.i.+llings a week. It is most unjust. If you only had a few machines you would be able to employ your own cutters. And they can be got so cheap nowadays."

This gave Leibel pause, and he departed without having definitely broken the negotiations. His whole week was befogged by doubt, his work became uncertain, his chalk marks lacked their usual decision, and he did not always cut his coat according to his cloth. His aberrations became so marked that pretty Rose Green, the sweater's eldest daughter, who managed a machine in the same room, divined, with all a woman's intuition, that he was in love.

"What is the matter?" she said, in rallying Yiddish, when they were taking their lunch of bread and cheese and ginger-beer amid the clatter of machines, whose serfs had not yet knocked off work.

"They are proposing me a match," he answered, sullenly.

"A match!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Rose. "Thou!" She had worked by his side for years, and familiarity bred the second person singular. Leibel nodded his head, and put a mouthful of Dutch cheese into it.

"With whom?" asked Rose. Somehow he felt ashamed. He gurgled the answer into the stone ginger-beer bottle, which he put to his thirsty lips.

"With Leah Volcovitch!"

"Leah Volcovitch!" gasped Rose. "Leah, the boot and shoe manufacturer's daughter?"

Leibel hung his head--he scarce knew why. He did not dare meet her gaze.

His droop said "Yes." There was a long pause.

"And why dost thou not have her?" said Rose. It was more than an inquiry; there was contempt in it, and perhaps even pique.

Leibel did not reply. The embarra.s.sing silence reigned again, and reigned long. Rose broke it at last.

"Is it that thou likest me better?" she asked.

Leibel seemed to see a ball of lightning in the air; it burst, and he felt the electric current strike right through his heart. The shock threw his head up with a jerk, so that his eyes gazed into a face whose beauty and tenderness were revealed to him for the first time. The face of his old acquaintance had vanished; this was a cajoling, coquettish, smiling face, suggesting undreamed-of things.

"_Nu_, yes," he replied, without perceptible pause.

"_Nu_, good!" she rejoined as quickly.

And in the ecstasy of that moment of mutual understanding Leibel forgot to wonder why he had never thought of Rose before. Afterward he remembered that she had always been his social superior.

The situation seemed too dream-like for explanation to the room just yet. Leibel lovingly pa.s.sed a bottle of ginger-beer, and Rose took a sip, with a beautiful air of plighting troth, understood only of those two. When Leibel quaffed the remnant it intoxicated him. The relics of the bread and cheese were the ambrosia to this nectar. They did not dare kiss; the suddenness of it all left them bashful, and the smack of lips would have been like a cannon-peal announcing their engagement. There was a subtler sweetness in this sense of a secret, apart from the fact that neither cared to break the news to the master tailor, a stern little old man. Leibel's chalk marks continued indecisive that afternoon, which shows how correctly Rose had connected them with love.

Before he left that night Rose said to him, "Art thou sure thou wouldst not rather have Leah Volcovitch?"

"Not for all the boots and shoes in the world," replied Leibel, vehemently.

"And I," protested Rose, "would rather go without my own than without thee."

The landing outside the workshop was so badly lighted that their lips came together in the darkness.

"Nay, nay; thou must not yet," said Rose. "Thou art still courting Leah Volcovitch. For aught thou knowest, Sugarman the Shadchan may have entangled thee beyond redemption."

"Not so," a.s.serted Leibel. "I have only seen the maiden once."

"Yes. But Sugarman has seen her father several times," persisted Rose.

"For so misshapen a maiden his commission would be large. Thou must go to Sugarman to-night, and tell him that thou canst not find it in thy heart to go on with the match."

"Kiss me, and I will go," pleaded Leibel.

"Go, and I will kiss thee," said Rose, resolutely.

"And when shall we tell thy father?" he asked, pressing her hand, as the next best thing to her lips.

"As soon as thou art free from Leah."

"But will he consent?"

"He will not be glad," said Rose, frankly. "But after mother's death--peace be upon her--the rule pa.s.sed from her hands into mine."

"Ah, that is well," said Leibel. He was a superficial thinker.

Leibel found Sugarman at supper. The great Shadchan offered him a chair, but nothing else. Hospitality was a.s.sociated in his mind with special occasions only, and involved lemonade and "stuffed monkeys."

He was very put out--almost to the point of indigestion--to hear of Leibel's final determination, and plied him with reproachful inquiries.

"You don't mean to say that you give up a boot and shoe manufacturer merely because his daughter has round shoulders!" he exclaimed, incredulously.

"It is more than round shoulders--it is a hump!" cried Leibel.

"And suppose? See how much better off you will be when you get your own machines! We do not refuse to let camels carry our burdens because they have humps."

"Ah, but a wife is not a camel," said Leibel, with a sage air.

"And a cutter is not a master tailor," retorted Sugarman.

"Enough, enough!" cried Leibel. "I tell you, I would not have her if she were a machine warehouse."

"There sticks something behind," persisted Sugarman, unconvinced.

Leibel shook his head. "Only her hump" he said with a flash of humour.

"Moses Mendelssohn had a hump," expostulated Sugarman, reproachfully.

"Yes, but he was a heretic," rejoined Leibel, who was not without reading. "And then he was a man! A man with two humps could find a wife for each. But a woman with a hump cannot expect a husband in addition."