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It was but for the moment. She might rise to the heresy of hot fried fish in lieu of cold, but Becky’s Sabbath altogether devoid of fried fish was a thought too sacrilegious for her childish brain.

From her earliest babyhood chunks of cold fried fish had been part of her conception of the Day of Rest. Visions and odours of her mother frying plaice and soles–at worst, cod or mackerel–were inwoven with her most sacred memories of the coming Sabbath; it is probable she thought Friday was short for frying-day.

With a sob she turned back, hurrying as if to escape the tug of temptation.

‘Bloomah! Where are you off to?’

It was the alarmed cry of a classmate. Bloomah took to her heels, her face a fiery mass of shame and grief.

Towards midday Becky’s fish, nicely browned and sprigged with parsley, stood cooling on the great blue willow-pattern dish, and Becky’s neuralgia abated, perhaps from the mental relief of the spectacle.

When the clock struck twelve, Bloomah was allowed to scamper off to school in the desperate hope of saving the afternoon attendance.

The London sky was of lead, and the London pavement of mud, but her heart was aglow with hope. As she reached the familiar street a certain strangeness in its aspect struck her. People stood at the doors gossiping and excited, as though no Sabbath pots were a-cooking; straggling groups possessed the roadway, impeding her advance, and as she got nearer to the school the crowd thickened, the roadway became impassable, a gesticulating mob blocked the iron gate.

Poor Bloomah paused in her breathless career ready to cry at this malicious fate fighting against her, and for the first time allowing herself time to speculate on what was up. All around her she became aware of weeping and wailing and shrieking and wringing of hands.

The throng was chiefly composed of Russian and Roumanian women of the latest immigration, as she could tell by the pious wigs hiding their tresses. Those in the front were pressed against the bars of the locked gate, shrieking through them, shaking them with passion.

Although Bloomah’s knowledge of Yiddish was slight–as became a scion of an old English family–she could make out their elemental ejaculations.

‘You murderers!’

‘Give me my Rachel!’

‘They are destroying our daughters as Pharaoh destroyed our sons.’

‘Give me back my children, and I’ll go back to Russia.’

‘They are worse than the Russians, the poisoners!’

‘O God of Abraham, how shall I live without my Leah?’

On the other side of the bars the children–released for the dinner-interval–were clamouring equally, shouting, weeping, trying to get to their mothers. Some howled, with their sleeves rolled up, to exhibit the upper arm.

‘See,’ the women cried, ‘the red marks! Oh, the poisoners!’

A light began to break upon Bloomah’s brain. Evidently the School Board had suddenly sent down compulsory vaccinators.

‘I won’t die,’ moaned a plump golden-haired girl. ‘I’m too young to die yet.’

‘My little lamb is dying!’ A woman near Bloomah, with auburn wisps showing under her black wig, wrung her hands. ‘I hear her talk–always, always about the red mark. Now they have given it her. She is poisoned–my little apple.’

‘Your little carrot is all right,’ said Bloomah testily. ‘They’ve only vaccinated her.’

The woman caught at the only word she understood. ‘Vaccinate, vaccinate!’ she repeated. Then, relapsing into jargon and raising her hands heavenward: ‘A sudden death upon them all!’

Bloomah turned despairingly in search of a wigless woman. One stood at her elbow.

‘Can’t you explain to her that the doctors mean no harm?’ Bloomah asked.

‘Oh, don’t they, indeed? Just you read this!’ She flourished a handbill, English on one side, Yiddish on the other.

Bloomah read the English version, not without agitation:

‘Mothers, look after your little ones! The School Tyrants are plotting to inject filthy vaccine into their innocent veins. Keep them away rather than let them be poisoned to enrich the doctors.’

There followed statistics to appal even Bloomah. What wonder if the refugees from lands of persecution–lands in which anything might happen–believed they had fallen from the frying-pan into the fire; if the rumour that executioners with instruments had entered the school-buildings had run like wildfire through the quarter, enflaming Oriental imagination to semi-madness.