Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 10

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Every morning Silver took a penny tram down Blenheim Road from the Oleander Street corner, opposite the clock-station where the conductors clocked in their times of arrival and departure. The tram took him down to Poulter Street in Bridgeways, a region that lined the pitch-black banks of the River Mitchen. It was a region of small damp dwelling-houses, from which he and his family had graduated a number of years ago. But he still worked there, in an establishment for making waterproof garments, which had once been a dwelling-house, too. The elderly Mr. Horowitz still dwelt in it, as a matter of fact, in one room, though he made waterproofs in all the others. His wife was dead. His one daughter had got married in Leeds without glory. He was an elderly man. What did he want more than one room for?

There was little else you could say about Mr. Horowitz or his establishment than that they were elderly. He had a grey discouraged beard that had stopped short a long time ago at a stage mid-way between being a short natty beard and a long dignified beard. He had elderly red-rimmed eyes. He was very round-shouldered, and all his bones creaked when he sat down to the machine. His house, like all the other houses in his street, had been built some time in the eighties. But it looked as if it went back two or three centuries before the Industrial Revolution; as if it had had a special little Industrial Revolution all of its own, to make it so piebald and grimy. In later years, and not many later, it was pointed out that that was the sooty source from which the broad auriferous Silver river derived. The spectator gaped. Or he chattered glibly of Fuggers, Medicis, Carnegies. A little time later still, he made less respectful comparisons.

But Mr. Horowitz had gratified his one ambition by that time, so he took no stock of the gaping of the silent ones or the chattering of the glib ones. Over in Jerusalem, under the lee of the Temple, he stood up against the Wailing Wall and said his prayers. He swayed his body left and right, or shook it forward and backward. He beat his bosom with his fist. He clapped together the palms of his hands. But the tears that rolled from his almost sightless eyes were a matter more of decorum than of grief. He had gratified his one ambition. They would shovel his old bones into a hole in the sacred hillside of Zion.

It had always been his intention to die in Zion. But he found himself side-tracked to England, which was further in space from his Bessarabian ghetto, but easier to get to. In that wealthy land his ambition endured a blossoming. He would work hard, he would make money, and he would not only die in Zion, he would live there, as the Patriarchs had done, sitting in the cool of the evening under the branches of his front-yard tree, with the hens clucking about the well, and friends hastening along the road to drink wine with him and discuss fine points of biblical commentary. He worked hard, day and night, for years; so hard that he did not realise he had long squeezed out of himself what little youth and energy he had brought with him. He found at length he had saved sixty pounds. The room his daughter had occupied was vacant, for she had married lately. With his sixty pounds he bought some seven or eight second-hand machines, as rickety as himself, and installed them in the room his daughter had vacated. He dismantled and sold the two beds in the front bedroom, for his wife in her grave needed no bed now and a sofa downstairs would suit his purposes. He then got in a joiner to knock up a few “makers’ tables.” Here his “makers” would sit, dipping their fingers into pots of rubber solution and smearing it into the seams of the garments that the contractor sent round in ready-cut bundles. The young “seamers” would sew together on their machines the edges where mere “smearing” would be inadequate. They would do the easy work, the straight edges, the belts. Mr. Horowitz himself, with a handful of “machiners,” would sew the difficult edges, the sleeves, the collars. He was himself a doughty hand at collars. It was said of him he made collars like for King Edward the Seventh.

Mr. Horowitz evacuated a further room, where the work would be examined and passed. His waterproof factory was ready now to begin operations, those operations which were to buy for Horowitz his passage to Palestine, a roof, a tree, a well, a grave, a stone.

But Horowitz was no bright star to hitch a waggon to. He looked decrepit, and so did his little factory. For some weeks it looked as if the sixty pounds he had earned during these back-breaking years were as much lost as if he had pitched them into the Mitchen. And then one day—rather more than a year before the strange evening of the meeting between Smirnof and Polednik—as Mr. Horowitz was shuffling up Blenheim Road, he met Mr. Silver. They were not well acquainted; they had, indeed, singularly little in common, for Mr. Horowitz was a devout Jew and a capitalist, whilst Silver was non-religious and a working-man by philosophy, so to speak, as well as by accident. But they had both worked together for a certain Mr. Winberg of Magnolia Street when he had started off a waterproof factory with the same sort of equipment, if not the same ambitions, as Mr. Horowitz sought to do now. Mr. Horowitz had left Mr. Winberg’s employ on the mere suggestion that he should continue working into the Sabbath evening during the “rush” times. Silver was still working for Mr. Winberg, and was making respectable money. And it was convenient, too, just slipping of a morning out of one back door and through another back door, and there you were at your work.

But in a very few minutes poor Mr. Horowitz had told so sad a tale that Silver arranged to go down to Bridgeways as soon as he had worked a week’s notice for Mr. Winberg. He would have gone down the very next day and sacrificed a few days’ wages, but he could not let Mr. Winberg down. Silver never let anybody down, though he took no credit to himself for that, and no one gave him any. It was merely what was expected from him.

“It’s a rush on,” said Silver. “Perhaps now he could not get another maker in at a moment’s notice. In one week I will be with you.”

“Thank you! How shall I thank you!” cried Mr. Horowitz, seizing Silver’s wrists. “You should live long!” A tear bumped against the bridge of his nose and collapsed into his beard. Then he stopped a moment. He had a sudden vision of blue skies in Zion and the yellow lamps of oranges in orange-groves. The sense of the hot dry holy stones of the Wailing Wall came up like a moth-wing against his mouth. He was agonisingly aware that his fulfilment of them must be thrust back seven long grey days if Silver did not come down with him, at once, to Poulter Street, if the machines did not start humming, if the naphtha fumes did not arise from the pots of solution like incense at the Golden Altar, the Altar of Incense, in the House of the Lord.

He closed one eye slyly. “And if I give you two weeks’ wages,” whispered Mr. Horowitz, “you will come down this afternoon?”

He saw at once he had made a mistake. A spot of colour came into Silver’s cheeks. He looked away, as if the suggestion had made him not so much angry as miserable.

“No! No! I was making a joke!” exclaimed Mr. Horowitz hurriedly. “In one week you will come? We will make money! You should live long!” he cried again.

“Let be!” said Silver. “I am happy!”

So Silver went down into Bridgeways to help Mr. Horowitz make waterproof coats, after having duly worked his week’s notice for Mr. Winberg. Before long most of Mr. Horowitz’s machines were manned by machiners and his makers’ tables by makers. That was due partly to the fact that people liked Silver, even when they were not anarchists, and they naturally drifted in the direction he had taken. It was due also to the fact that the “rush” Silver had spoken of, the “rush” which might have made it difficult for Mr. Winberg to get another workman in at a moment’s notice, subsided as capriciously as it arose.

But for some reason the concern did not prosper. Whereas Mr. Winberg of Magnolia Street came down into the very next street and knocked house after house together till the street was all Winberg, Mr. Horowitz only just managed to keep his head above water. And from time to time he only managed that because Silver furtively remitted part of his wages. The concern lacked youth, energy, or, much more, business ability. Not a garment left Silver’s hands the parts of which were not well and truly stuck together. Mr. Horowitz was just as punctilious with his sewing together of their edges. But whereas at first he sewed them as if he were making the sails for a boat which should carry him past flat-land and promontory forward to Zion, he now handled them mournfully as if he were making his shroud. His back creaked louder as he stooped over his machine, his chin fell further down upon his chest. No, not under the golden ramparts would they carry his bones at last to a grave in the holy hillside, but to a hole in Wheatley cemetery, where the Doomington rains seeped down into the clay between the roots of sparse alien weeds.

More than two years passed in this way. It was a cheerless place, that small house-factory in Poulter Street close up against the sluggish blackness of the Mitchen river. But it made Silver look forward all the more eagerly to the anarchistic evenings in his Oleander Street kitchen. Once or twice he even induced Mr. Horowitz to come and join the conference. But the experiment did not add to the old man’s joy of living. In the first place, he was a capitalist, a sweater, an exploiter of labour. Dan Jamieson, the Socialist candidate, who had not succeeded in roaring his way into Parliament, tried angrily to convert him to Socialism. The presence of the Silver daughters en masse did not quicken his aged heartbeats. And Polednik scrutinised him acidly, as if he were an item in a row of statistics. Sometimes he took him to task quite sharply, for the old gentleman was a Zionist. Polednik had quite early on given up the hope of conducting any serious propaganda among these babblers, but he esteemed it an official duty to pounce on any manifestation of the Zionist impulse. Zionism as a political doctrine was anathema to the Poledniks. They considered it sapped the will to class-war of the Jewish proletariat; behind its romantic mask grinned the teeth of Big Business.

Looking to right and left of him fearfully, old Horowitz crept away from Silver’s kitchen. There was no place for him there. There was no place for him anywhere, saving in that place which is in the holy mountains. He shook his head ruefully. The words of the Psalm dripped from his lips as the tears from his eyes:

“The Lord shall count, when He writeth up the people, that this man was born there.”

A small boy in Blenheim Road stopped as the old man shuffled by. He did not like the way the old man was chanting to himself; so he made a ball out of a dirty newspaper in the gutter and threw it at his dinted top-hat. But the old man went on intoning:

“As well the singers as the players on instruments shall be there. All my springs are in Thee.”

He would not hear the singers, no, nor the players on instruments, saving if the Lord should work a miracle.

A miracle? What, a miracle? Was it not a miracle, neither more nor less, that Silver should win fifty pounds in a Dutch lottery two or three weeks before Christmas? If God had not quitted the cloudy tops of Sinai for the express purpose of looking into the matter of Horowitz and his grave in Zion, how was it that Silver had won a lottery as far away as Amsterdam when he was working for Horowitz in Doomington?

What is more, almost the first person Silver told about the prodigious money was none other than Horowitz himself. Mrs. Silver had gone marketing in Shudehill and the Silver daughters were gone, too, when the postman delivered the news; excepting May, who was giving her father his breakfast. And it would not occur to May to suggest what way the money should be spent. A little dizzy with his good luck, but conscientiously aware of a waterproof “rush” which included even the Horowitz factory in its scope, Silver took the tram down to Bridgeways at once, to be in good time for the day’s work. He tipped the conductor a shilling. The conductor said “Heck!” staring at the shilling as if it were a card-trick. Silver blushed like a man who has been caught filching a penny from a blind man’s tin. Then he looked through the window, as if nothing at all had happened.

“What do you think?” said Silver to Mr. Horowitz.

“What? What?” the old man began suspiciously. “Well, what?”

“I have won a lottery!”

“You are crazy,” said Mr. Horowitz. “No?”

“I am a capitalist,” said Silver. “I tell you I have won a prize in the Dutch lottery. From fifty pounds.”

“What?” moaned Mr. Horowitz. “You have won a lottery? From fifty pounds? What do you want with fifty pounds?” His bloodshot eyes rolled miserably. “How many tsentels, how many tenth-parts, did you take? How many lotteries——” He stopped. He knew. He knew in his bones that Silver had taken at most only one-tenth part of a ticket, and in one lottery only. “I took it for a joke,” said Silver. “It was so funny that Cohen, who comes round collecting for the coal, he should be an agent for a Holland lottery as well. So I paid him a shilling a week as well for a lottery.”

Mr. Horowitz groaned. For years he had taken shares in Dutch, Swiss, Scandinavian lotteries, spending far more money than he or his factory could afford, in the sick hope that Chance might yield him the passage to the Promised Land that Age, Industry, and Prayer had denied him.

Then suddenly, more overpoweringly than his senses had ever registered them, the blinding blue of Zion’s noontime smote his eyeballs. He sniffed the aromatic odour of citrons coming up in baskets from Sharon, from the flat places.

Now, now, or never ...

“What you will do with those fifty pounds?” he cried. “You do not know what you will do with them!” Which was indeed quite true, for Silver had hardly had a moment yet to consider the matter. “I know! I will tell you! You must not say no! I tell you if you say no——” He wrung his hands feverishly. He was like a lover whose girl has held him at arm’s length for years. He can bear it no more. If she does not yield something, everything, now, this moment, calamity is upon them both.

Horowitz grasped the lapels of Silver’s coat. “You are saying no! I tell you, it is a bargain!” The old man’s red-rimmed eyes glared like a bird’s.

“But of course!” said Silver, his teeth knocking. He had no idea that the shrivelled old man had somewhere within him a reservoir of such fierce energy. And it did not occur to him that he could possibly withhold from Horowitz, or anyone else, a thing so craved for, whatever it might be.

“I buy it!” announced Silver.

Horowitz did not hear him. Or only his ears heard. His soul could not permit itself to register a victory earned with a few puffings of breath when the long assault from year to year of sweat and blood and tears had failed.

“It is my business I sell you! I paid sixty pounds! I want no more than fifty! No, I will not take one penny more! Perhaps your daughters have money saved in the savings-bank? I do not want one farthing of it, I tell you. You see what a business we make here! Busy like in middle Market Street! I sell it you! I have finished with it! I am an old man! I will buy my passage to the Land of Israel! This very morning I’ll take the ticket at Garden’s Travelling Office! You will come with me to get the ticket!” He flung back his arms in a superb gesture, as of someone who confers an ineffable privilege—the prima donna who permits the gallery girl to enter her dressing-room, the captain of the ocean liner who permits a schoolboy to stand on the bridge beside him.

“And you will stay in Doomington,” he continued. “You have bought the business.” Insensibly his voice slid into sing-song. He half closed his eyes. The gift of prophecy came down upon him. “It will grow and it will grow. It will be like the oak-tree that has been an acorn and that shall be a wood of oak-trees. People will look at Winberg’s and they will laugh. They will say: ‘Pah! Is that the place where they feed the pigs?’ But you—you will have so many windows that the Town Hall will look the other way. In Liverpool, in Bradford, in the Wales, they will say: ‘Silver, what does he think about it?’ Men from London and from strange Parliaments will come to visit you and bring flowers for your wife. Your daughters, they will marry Counts from all the old families ...”

Then his voice petered out. The spirit flapped its wings and was away. He put his head on one side and held the palms of his hands before him, the fingers curling in upon them like talons. “You will buy my business,” he wheedled. “Only fifty pounds I am asking.”

“But of course,” said Silver, as it were casually. “Have I not said already? I buy!”

“You buy? You buy?” Mr. Horowitz clapped his hands like a slum child on a char-à-banc who sees the sea opening before him for the first time. He hurled his arms round Silver’s neck and kissed him on both cheeks.

“Come,” he said, “to the Cricketer’s Arms! We will drink it a mazel tov, in brandy! This very second, I tell you!”

That was how Sam Silver, of Oleander Street, found himself a pillar of the capitalist order one morning in December nineteen hundred and eleven, the year of the accession of His Majesty King George the Fifth.