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Anglicization
by
III
With the daughters–and there were three before the son and heir–there was less of religious friction, since women have not the pious privileges and burdens of the sterner sex. When the eldest, Deborah, was married, her husband received, by way of compensation, the goodwill of the Sudminster business, while S. Cohn migrated to the metropolis, in the ambition of making ‘S. Cohn’s trouserings’ a household word. He did, indeed, achieve considerable fame in the Holloway Road.
Gradually he came to live away from his business, and in the most fashionable street of Highbury. But he was never to recover his exalted posts. The London parish had older inhabitants, the local synagogue richer members. The cry for Anglicization was common property. From pioneer, S. Cohn found himself outmoded. The minister, indeed, was only too English–and especially his wife. One would almost have thought from their deportment that they considered themselves the superiors instead of the slaves of the congregation. S. Cohn had been accustomed to a series of clergymen, who must needs be taught painfully to parrot ‘Our Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales, the Princess of Wales, and all the Royal Family’–the indispensable atom of English in the service–so that he, the expert, had held his breath while they groped and stumbled along the precipitous pass. Now the whilom Gabbai and Town Councillor found himself almost patronized–as a poor provincial–by this mincing, genteel clerical couple. He retorted by animadverting upon the preacher’s heterodoxy.
An urban unconcern met the profound views so often impressed on Simon with a strap. ‘We are not in Poland now,’ said the preacher, shrugging his shoulders.
‘In Poland!’ S. Cohn’s blood boiled. To be twitted with Poland, after decades of Anglicization! He, who employed a host of Anglo-Saxon clerks, counter-jumpers, and packers! ‘And where did your father come from?’ he retorted hotly.
He had almost a mind to change his synagogue, but there was no other within such easy walking distance–an important Sabbatic consideration–and besides, the others were reported to be even worse. Dread rumours came of a younger generation that craved almost openly for organs in the synagogue and women’s voices in the choir, nay, of even more flagitious spirits–devotional dynamitards–whose dream was a service all English, that could be understood instead of chanted! Dark mutterings against the ancient Rabbis were in the very air of these wealthier quarters of London.
‘Oh, shameless ignorance of the new age,’ S. Cohn was wont to complain, ‘that does not know the limits of Anglicization!’
IV
That Simon should enter his father’s business was as inevitable as that the business should prosper in spite of Simon.
His career had been settled ere his father became aware that Highbury aspired even to law and medicine, and the idea that Simon’s education was finished was not lightly to be dislodged. Simon’s education consisted of the knowledge conveyed in seaport schools for the sons of tradesmen, while a long course of penny dreadfuls had given him a peculiar and extensive acquaintance with the ways of the world. Carefully curtained away in a secret compartment, lay his elementary Hebrew lore. It did not enter into his conception of the perfect Englishman. Ah, how he rejoiced in this wider horizon of London, so thickly starred with music-halls, billiard-rooms, and restaurants! ‘We are emancipated now,’ was his cry: ‘we have too much intellect to keep all those old laws;’ and he swallowed the forbidden oyster in a fine spiritual glow, which somehow or other would not extend to bacon. That stuck more in his throat, and so was only taken in self-defence, to avoid the suspicions of a convivial company.
As he sat at his father’s side in the synagogue–a demure son of the Covenant–this young Englishman lurked beneath his praying-shawl, even as beneath his prayer-book had lurked ‘The Pirates of Pechili.’
In this hidden life Mrs. S. Cohn was not an aider or abettor, except in so far as frequent gifts from her own pocket-money might be considered the equivalent of the surreptitious cake of childhood. She would have shared in her husband’s horror had she seen Simon banqueting on unrighteousness, and her apoplexy would have been original, not derivative. For her, indeed, London had proved narrowing rather than widening. She became part of a parish instead of part of a town, and of a Ghetto in a parish at that! The vast background of London was practically a mirage–the London suburb was farther from London than the provincial town. No longer did the currents of civic life tingle through her; she sank entirely to family affairs, excluded even from the ladies’ committee. Her lord’s life, too, shrank, though his business extended–the which, uneasily suspected, did but increase his irritability. He had now the pomp and pose of his late offices minus any visible reason: a Sir Oracle without a shrine, an abdomen without authority.