REUBEN SACHS

A SKETCH BY AMY LEVY AUTHOR OF “A MINOR POET” AND “THE ROMANCE OF A SHOP” London MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1888 The Right of Translation and Reproduction is reserved Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, LONDON AND BUNGAY. {1}

CHAPTER I. This is my beloved Son.

Reuben Sachs was the pride of his family.

After a highly successful career at one of the great London day-schools, he had gone up on a scholarship to the University, where, if indeed he had chosen to turn aside from the beaten paths of academic distinction, he had made good use of his time in more ways than one.

The fact that he was a Jew had proved{2} no bar to his popularity; he had gained many desirable friends and had, to some extent, shaken off the provincialism inevitable to one born and bred in the Jewish community.

At the bar, to which in due course he was called, his usual good fortune did not desert him.

Before he was twenty-five he had begun to be spoken of as “rising”; and at twenty-six, by unsuccessfully contesting a hard-fought election, had attracted to himself attention of another sort. He had no objection, he said, to the woolsack; but a career of political distinction was growing slowly but surely to be his leading aim in life.

“He will never starve,” said his mother, shrugging her shoulders with a comfortable consciousness of safe investments; “and he must marry money. But Reuben can be trusted to do nothing rash.” In the midst{3} of so much that was highly promising, his health had broken down suddenly, and he had gone off grumbling to the antipodes.

It was a case of over-work, of over-strain, of nervous break-down, said the doctors; no doubt a sea-voyage would set him right again, but he must be careful of himself in the future.

“More than half my nervous patients are recruited from the ranks of the Jews,” said the great physician whom Reuben consulted. “You pay the penalty of too high a civilization.”

“On the other hand,” Reuben answered, “we never die; so we may be said to have our compensations.”

Reuben’s father had not borne out his son’s theory; he had died many years before my story opens, greatly to his own surprise and that of a family which could boast more than one nonogenarian in a generation.{4}

He had left his wife and children well provided for, and the house in Lancaster Gate was rich in material comfort.

In the drawing-room of this house Mrs. Sachs and her daughter were sitting on the day of Reuben’s return from his six months’ absence.

He had arrived early in the day, and was now sleeping off the effects of a night passed in travelling, and of the plentiful supply of fatted calf with which he had been welcomed.

His devoted womankind meanwhile sipped their tea in the fading light of the September afternoon, and talked over the event of the day in the rapid, nervous tones peculiar to them.

Mrs. Sachs was an elderly woman, stout and short, with a wide, sallow, impassive face, lighted up by occasional gleams of shrewdness from a pair of half-shut eyes.

An indescribable air of intense, but subdued{5} vitality characterized her presence; she did not appear in good health, but you saw at a glance that this was an old lady whom it would be difficult to kill.

“He looks better, Addie, he looks very well indeed,” she said, the dull red spot of colour on either sallow cheek alone testifying to her excitement.

“I have said all along,” answered her daughter, “that if Reuben had been a poor man the doctors would never have found out that he wanted a sea-voyage at all. Let us only hope that it has done him no harm professionally.” She emptied her tea-cup as she spoke, and cut herself a fresh slice of the rich cake which she was devouring with nervous voracity.

Adelaide Sachs, or to give her her right title, Mrs. Montagu Cohen, was a thin, dark young woman of eight or nine-and-twenty, with a restless, eager, sallow face, and an{6} abrupt manner. She was richly and very fashionably dressed in an unbecoming gown of green shot silk, and wore big diamond solitaires in her ears. She and her mother indeed were never seen without such jewels, which seemed to bear the same relation to their owners as his pigtail does to the Chinaman.

Adelaide was the eldest of the family; she had married young a husband chosen for her, with whom she lived with average contentment.

Reuben was scarcely two years her junior; no one cared to remember the age of Lionel, the youngest of the three, a hopeless ne’er-do-weel, who had with difficulty been relegated to an obscure colony.

“There is always either a ne’er-do-weel or an idiot in every Jewish family!” Esther Kohnthal had remarked in one of her appalling bursts of candour.{7}

The mother and daughter sat there in the growing dusk, amid the plush ottomans, stamped velvet tables, and other Philistine splendours of the large drawing-room, till the lamp-lighter came down the Bayswater Road and the gilt clock on the mantelpiece struck six.

Almost at the same moment the door was flung open and a voice cried:

“Why do women invariably sit in the dark?”

It was a pleasant voice; to a fine ear, unmistakably the voice of a Jew, though the accents of the speaker were free from the cockney twang which marred the speech of the two women.

“Reuben! I thought you were asleep,” cried his mother.

“So I was. Now I have arisen like a giant refreshed.”

A man of middle height and slender build{8} had made his way across the room to the window; his face was indistinct in the darkness as he stooped and put his arm caressingly about the broad, fat shoulder of his mother.

“Dressed for dinner already, Reuben?” was all she said, though the hard eye under the cautious old eyelid grew soft as she spoke.

Her love for this son and her pride in him were the passion of her life.

“Dinner? You are never going to kill the fatted calf twice over? But seriously, I must run down to the club for an hour or two. There may be letters.”

He hesitated a moment, then added: “I shall look in at the Leunigers on my way back.”

“The Leunigers!” cried Adelaide in open disapproval.

“Reuben, there’s the old gentleman. He{9} won’t like your going first to your cousins,” said his mother.

“My grandfather? Oh, but my arrival isn’t an official fact till to-morrow. We were sixteen hours before our time, remember. Good-bye, Addie. I suppose you and Monty will be dining in Portland Place to-morrow with the rest of us. What a gathering of the clans! Well, I must be off.” And he suited the action to the word.

“Why on earth need he rush off like that to the Leunigers?” said Mrs. Cohen as she drew on her gloves.

Her mother looked across at her through the dusk.

“Reuben will do nothing rash,” she said.{10}

CHAPTER II.

Whatever my mood is, I love Piccadilly.

London Lyrics.

Reuben Sachs stepped into the twilit street with a distinct sense of exhilaration.

He was back again; back to the old, full, strenuous life which was so dear to him; to the din and rush and struggle of the London which he loved with a passion that had something of poetry in it.

With the eager curiosity, the vivid interest in life, which underlay his rather impassive bearing, it was impossible that foreign travel should be without charm for him; but he returned with unmixed delight to his own haunts; to the work and the play; the{11} market-place, and the greetings in the market-place; to the innumerable pleasantnesses of an existence which owed something of its piquancy to the fact that it was led partly in the democratic atmosphere of modern London, partly in the conservative precincts of the Jewish community.

Now as he lingered a moment on the pavement, looking up and down the road for a hansom, the light from the street lamp fell full upon him, revealing what the darkness of his mother’s drawing-room had previously hidden from sight.

He was, as I have said, of middle height and slender build. He wore good clothes, but they could not disguise the fact that his figure was bad, and his movements awkward; unmistakably the figure and movements of a Jew.

And his features, without presenting any marked national trait, bespoke no less clearly his Semitic origin.{12}

His complexion was of a dark pallor; the hair, small moustache and eyes, dark, with red lights in them; over these last the lids were drooping, and the whole face wore for the moment a relaxed, dreamy, impassive air, curiously Eastern, and not wholly free from melancholy.

He walked slowly in the direction of an advancing hansom, hailed it quickly and quietly, and had himself driven off to Pall Mall. To every movement of the man clung that indescribable suggestion of an irrepressible vitality which was the leading characteristic of his mother.

There were several letters for him at the club; having discussed them, and been greeted by half a dozen men of his acquaintance, he dined lightly off a chop and a glass of claret, and gave himself up to what was apparently an exceedingly pleasant reverie.{13}

The club where he sat was not, as he himself would have been the first to acknowledge, in the front rank of such institutions; but it was respectable and had its advantages. As for its drawbacks, supported by his sense of better things to come, Reuben Sachs could tolerate them.

It was nearly half past eight when Reuben’s cab drew up before the Leunigers’ house in Kensington Palace Gardens, where a blaze of light from the lower windows told him that he had come on no vain errand.

Israel Leuniger had begun life as a clerk on the Stock Exchange, where he had been fortunate enough to find employment in the great broking firm of Sachs & Co. There his undeniable business talents and devotion to his work had met with ample reward. He had advanced from one confidential post to another; after a successful speculation on his own account, had been admitted into partner{14}ship, and finally, like the industrious apprentice of the story books, had married his master’s daughter.

In these days the reins of government in Capel Court had fallen almost entirely into his hands. Solomon Sachs, though a wonderful man of his years, was too old for regular attendance in the city, while poor Kohnthal, the other member of the firm, and, like Leuniger, son-in-law to old Solomon, had been shut up in a madhouse for the last ten years and more.

As Reuben advanced into the large, heavily upholstered vestibule, one of the many surrounding doors opened slowly, and a woman emerged with a vague, uncertain movement into the light.

She might have been fifty years of age, perhaps more, perhaps less; her figure was slim as a girl’s, but the dark hair, uncovered by a cap, was largely mixed with gray. The{15} long, oval face was of a deep, unwholesome, sallow tinge; and from its haggard gloom looked out two dark, restless, miserable eyes; the eyes of a creature in pain. Her dress was rich but carelessly worn, and about her whole person was an air of neglect.

“Aunt Ada!” cried Reuben, going forward.

She rubbed her lean sallow hands together, saying in low, broken, lifeless tones: “We didn’t expect you till to-morrow, Reuben. I hope your health has improved.” This was quite a long speech for Mrs. Leuniger, who was of a monosyllabic habit.

Before Reuben could reply, the door opposite the one from which his aunt had emerged was flung open, and two little boys, dressed in sailor-suits, rushed into the hall.

One was dark, with bright black eyes; the other had a shock of flame-coloured hair, and pale, prominent eyes. “Reuben!” they{16} cried in astonishment, and rushed upon their cousin.

“Lionel! Sidney!” protested their mother faintly as the boys proceeded to take all sorts of liberties with the new arrival.

The door by which they had come opened again, and a man’s voice cried, half in fun:

“Why on earth are you youngsters making this confounded row? Be off to bed, or you’ll be sorry for it!”

Reuben was standing under the light of a lamp, a smile on his face, as he lifted little red-haired Sidney from the ground and held him suspended by his wide sailor-collar.

“It’s Reuben, old Reuben come back!” cried the children.

An exclamation followed; the door was flung open wide; Reuben set down the child with a laugh and passed into the lighted room.{17}

CHAPTER III.

The Leunigers’ drawing-room, in which Reuben now found himself, was a spacious apartment, hung with primrose coloured satin, furnished throughout in impeccable Louis XV. and lighted with incandescent gas from innumerable chandeliers and sconces. Beyond, divided by a plush-draped alcove, was a room of smaller size, where, at present, could be discerned the intent, Semitic faces of some half-dozen card-players.{18}

In the front room four or five young people in evening dress were grouped, but at Reuben’s entrance they all came forward with various exclamations of greeting.

“Thought you weren’t coming back till to-morrow!”

“I shouldn’t have known you; you’re as brown as a berry!”

“See the conquering hero comes!”

This last from Rose Leuniger, a fat girl of twenty, in a tight-fitting blue silk dress, with the red hair and light eyes à fleur de tête of her little brother.

“I am awfully glad to see you looking so well,” added Leopold Leuniger, the owner of the voice.

He was a short, slight person of one or two-and-twenty, with a picturesque head of markedly tribal character.

The dark, oval face, bright, melancholy eyes, alternately dreamy and shrewd; the{19} charming, humorous smile, with its flash of white even teeth, might have belonged to some poet or musician, instead of to the son of a successful Jewish stockbroker.

By his side stood a small, dark, gnome-like creature, apparently entirely overpowered by the rich, untidy garments she was wearing. She was a girl, or woman, whose age it would be difficult to determine, with small, glittering eyes that outshone the diamonds in her ears.

Her trailing gown of heavy flowered brocade was made with an attempt at picturesqueness; an intention which was further evidenced by the studied untidiness of the tousled hair, and by the thick strings of amber coiled round the lean brown neck.

This was Esther Kohnthal, the only child of poor Kohnthal; and, according to her own account, the biggest heiress and the ugliest woman in all Bayswater.{20}

Shuffling up awkwardly behind her came Ernest Leuniger, the eldest son of the house, of whom it would be unfair to say that he was an idiot. He was nervous, delicate; had a rooted aversion to society; and was obliged by his state of health to spend the greater part of his time in the country.

Esther used to shrug her shoulders and smile shrewdly and unpleasantly whenever this description of what she chose to consider the family skeleton was given out in her hearing; she told every one, quite frankly, that her own father was in a madhouse.

Judith Quixano came up a little behind the others, with a hesitation in her manner which was new to her, and of which she herself was unconscious.

She was twenty-two years of age, in the very prime of her youth and beauty; a{21} tall, regal-looking creature, with an exquisite dark head, features like those of a face cut on gem or cameo, and wonderful, lustrous, mournful eyes, entirely out of keeping with the accepted characteristics of their owner.

Her smooth, oval cheek glowed with a rich, yet subdued, hue of perfect health; and her tight-fitting fashionable white evening dress showed to advantage the generous lines of a figure which was distinguished for stateliness rather than grace.

Reuben Sachs had looked straight at this girl on entering the room; but he shook hands with her last of all, clasping her fingers closely and searching her face with his eyes. They were not cousins, her relationship to the Leunigers coming from the father’s side; but there had always been between them a fiction of cousinship,{22} which had made possible what is rare all the world over, but rarer than ever in the Jewish community—an intimacy between young people of opposite sexes.

“I thought I had better come while I could. We were before our time,” said Reuben as they sat down, the whole party of them grouped close together, with the exception of Ernest, who returned to his solitaire board, a plaything which afforded him perpetual occupation. After several years of practice he had never arrived at leaving the glass marble in solitary state on the board; but he lived in hopes.

“While you could! Before, in fact, fashion had again claimed Mr. Reuben Sachs for her own,” cried Esther.

“I don’t know about fashion,” answered Reuben with perfect good temper; Esther was Esther, and if you began to mind what{23} she said, you would never know where to stop; “but there are a hundred things to be attended to. I suppose every one is going to the grandpater’s feed to-morrow?”

Every one was going; then, turning to Leo, Reuben said: “When do you go up?”

“Not till October 14th.”

Leopold Leuniger was on the eve of his third year at Cambridge.

“What have you been doing this Long?”

“Oh ... staying about.”

“Leo has been stopping with Lord Norwood, but we are not allowed to mention it,” cried Rose in her loud, penetrating voice, “in case it should seem that we are proud.”

Leo, who was passing through a sensitive phase of his growth, winced visibly, and Reuben said in a matter-of-fact way: “Oh, by the by, I came across a cousin of Lord{24} Norwood’s abroad—Lee-Harrison; a curious fellow, but a good fellow.”

“A howling swell,” added Esther, “with a double-barrelled name.”

“Exactly. But the point about him is that he has gone over body and soul to the Jewish community.”

There was an ironical exclamation all round. The Jews, the most clannish and exclusive of peoples, the most keen to resent outside criticism, can say hard things of one another within the walls of the ghetto.

“He says himself,” went on Reuben, “that he has a taste for religion. I believe he flirted with the Holy Mother for some years, but didn’t get caught. Then he joined a set of mystics, and lived for three months on a mountain, somewhere in Asia Minor. Now he has come round to thinking Judaism the one religion, and has been regularly received into the synagogue.{25}”

“And expects, no doubt,” said Esther, “to be rejoiced over as the one sinner that repenteth. I hope you didn’t shatter his illusions by telling him that he would more likely be considered a fool for his pains?”

Reuben laughed, and with an amused expression on his now animated face went on: “He has a seat in Berkeley Street, and a brand new talith, but still he is not happy. He complains that the Jews he meets in society are unsatisfactory; they have no local colour. I said I thought I could promise him a little local colour; I hope to have the pleasure of introducing him to you all.”

They all laughed with the exception of Rose, who said, rather offended: “I don’t know about local colour. We don’t wear turbans.”

Reuben put back his head, laughing a{26} little, and seeking Judith’s eyes for the answering smile he knew he should find there.

She had been keeping rather in the background to-night, quietly but intensely happy.

Reuben was back again! How delightfully familiar was every tone, every inflection of his voice! And how well she knew the changes of his face: the heavy dreaminess, the imperturbable air of Eastern gravity; then lo! the lifting of the mask; the flash and play of kindling features; the fire of speaking eyes; the hundred lights and shades of expression that she could so well interpret.

“What do his people say to it all?” asked Leo.

“Lee-Harrison’s? Oh, I believe they take it very sensibly. They say it’s only Bertie,” answered Reuben, rising and hold{27}ing out his hand to his uncle, who sauntered in from the card-room.