Part 6 (1/2)

The dress fluttered in the breeze. Mrs. Jacobs caressed the stuff between her thumb and forefinger.

”Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk,” she announced with a long ecstatic quaver.

Mrs. Isaacs stood paralyzed by the brilliancy of the repartee.

Mrs. Jacobs withdrew the moire antique and exhibited a mauve gown.

”Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk.”

The mauve fluttered for a triumphant instant, the next a puce and amber dress floated on the breeze.

”Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk.” Mrs. Jacobs's fingers smoothed it lovingly, then it was drawn within to be instantly replaced by a green dress.

Mrs. Jacobs pa.s.sed the skirt slowly through her fingers.

”Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awl silk!” she quavered mockingly.

By this time Mrs. Isaacs's face was the color of the latest flag of victory.

”The tallyman!” she tried to retort, but the words stuck in her throat.

Fortunately just then she caught sight of her poor lamb playing with the other poor lamb. She dashed at her offspring, boxed its ears and crying, ”You little blackguard, if I ever catch you playing with blackguards again, I'll wring your neck for you,” she hustled the infant into the house and slammed the door viciously behind her.

Moses had welcomed this every-day scene, for it put off a few moments his encounter with the formidable Malka. As she had not appeared at door or window, he concluded she was in a bad temper or out of London; neither alternative was pleasant.

He knocked at the door of Milly's house where her mother was generally to be found, and an elderly char-woman opened it. There were some bottles of spirit, standing on a wooden side-table covered with a colored cloth, and some unopened biscuit bags. At these familiar premonitory signs of a festival, Moses felt tempted to beat a retreat.

He could not think for the moment what was up, but whatever it was he had no doubt the well-to-do persons would supply him with ice. The char-woman, with brow darkened by soot and gloom, told him that Milly was upstairs, but that her mother had gone across to her own house with the clothes-brush.

Moses's face fell. When his wife was alive, she had been a link of connection between ”The Family” and himself, her cousin having generously employed her as a char-woman. So Moses knew the import of the clothes-brush. Malka was very particular about her appearance and loved to be externally speckless, but somehow or other she had no clothes-brush at home. This deficiency did not matter ordinarily, for she practically lived at Milly's. But when she had words with Milly or her husband, she retired to her own house to sulk or _schmull_, as they called it. The carrying away of the clothes-brush was, thus, a sign that she considered the breach serious and hostilities likely to be protracted. Sometimes a whole week would go by without the two houses ceasing to stare sullenly across at each other, the situation in Milly's camp being aggravated by the lack of a clothes-brush. In such moments of irritation, Milly's husband was apt to declare that his mother-in-law had abundance of clothes-brushes, for, he pertinently asked, how did she manage during her frequent business tours in the country? He gave it as his conviction that Malka merely took the clothes-brush away to afford herself a handle for returning. But then Ephraim Phillips was a graceless young fellow, the death of whose first wife was probably a judgment on his levity, and everybody except his second mother-in-law knew that he had a book of tickets for the Oxbridge Music Hall, and went there on Friday nights. Still, in spite of these facts, experience did show that whenever Milly's camp had outsulked Malka's, the old woman's surrender was always veiled under the formula of: ”Oh Milly, I've brought you over your clothes-brush. I just noticed it, and thought you might be wanting it.” After this, conversation was comparatively easy.

Moses hardly cared to face Malka in such a crisis of the clothes-brush.

He turned away despairingly, and was going back through the small archway which led to the Ruins and the outside world, when a grating voice startled his ear.

”Well, Meshe, whither fliest thou? Has my Milly forbidden thee to see me?”

He looked back. Malka was standing at her house-door. He retraced his steps.

”N-n-o,” he murmured. ”I thought you still out with your stall.”

That was where she should have been, at any rate, till half an hour ago.

She did not care to tell herself, much less Moses, that she had been waiting at home for the envoy of peace from the filial camp summoning her to the ceremony of the Redemption of her grandson.

”Well, now thou seest me,” she said, speaking Yiddish for his behoof, ”thou lookest not outwardly anxious to know how it goes with me.”

”How goes it with you?”

”As well as an old woman has a right to expect. The Most High is good!”

Malka was in her most amiable mood, to emphasize to outsiders the injustice of her kin in quarrelling with her. She was a tall woman of fifty, with a tanned equine gypsy face surmounted by a black wig, and decorated laterally by great gold earrings. Great black eyes blazed beneath great black eyebrows, and the skin between them was capable of wrinkling itself black with wrath. A gold chain was wound thrice round her neck, and looped up within her black silk bodice. There were numerous rings on her fingers, and she perpetually smelt of peppermint.

”_Nu_, stand not chattering there,” she went on. ”Come in. Dost thou wish me to catch my death of cold?”

Moses slouched timidly within, his head bowed as if in dread of knocking against the top of the door. The room was a perfect fac-simile of Milly's parlor at the other end of the diagonal, save that instead of the festive bottles and paper bags on the small side-table, there was a cheerless clothes-brush. Like Milly's, the room contained a round table, a chest of drawers with decanters on the top, and a high mantelpiece decorated with pendant green fringes, fastened by big-headed bra.s.s nails. Here cheap china dogs, that had had more than their day squatted amid l.u.s.tres with crystal drops. Before the fire was a lofty steel guard, which, useful enough in Milly's household, had survived its function in Malka's, where no one was ever likely to tumble into the grate. In a corner of the room a little staircase began to go upstairs.