new silk, the other a medley of broken ribs and cotton rags. Becky
had given him the first to prevent the family disgrace of the spectacle
of his promenades with the second. But he would not carry the new one on
week-days because it was too good. And on Sabbaths it is a sin to carry
any umbrella. So Becky's self-sacrifice was vain, and her umbrella stood
in the corner, a standing gratification to the proud possessor.
Kosminski had had a hard fight for his substance, and was not given to
waste. He was a tall, harsh-looking man of fifty, with grizzled hair, to
whom life meant work, and work meant money, and money meant savings. In
Parliamentary Blue-Books, English newspapers, and the Berner Street
Socialistic Club, he was called a "sweater," and the comic papers
pictured him with a protuberant paunch and a greasy smile, but he had
not the remotest idea that he was other than a God-fearing, industrious,
and even philanthropic citizen. The measure that had been dealt to him
he did but deal to others. He saw no reason why immigrant paupers should
not live on a crown a week while he taught them how to handle a
press-iron or work a sewing machine. They were much better off than in
Poland. He would have been glad of such an income himself in those
terrible first days of English life when he saw his wife and his two
babes starving before his eyes, and was only precluded from investing a
casual twopence in poison by ignorance of the English name for anything
deadly. And what did he live on now? The fowl, the pint of haricot
beans, and the haddocks which Chayah purchased for the Sabbath
overlapped into the middle of next week, a quarter of a pound of coffee
lasted the whole week, the grounds being decocted till every grain of
virtue was extracted. Black bread and potatoes and pickled herrings
made up the bulk of the every-day diet No, no one could accuse Bear
Belcovitch of fattening on the entrails of his employees. The furniture
was of the simplest and shabbiest,--no aesthetic instinct urged the
Kosminskis to overpass the bare necessities of existence, except in
dress. The only concessions to art were a crudely-colored _Mizrach_ on
the east wall, to indicate the direction towards which the Jew should
pray, and the mantelpiece mirror which was bordered with yellow
scalloped paper (to save the gilt) and ornamented at each corner with
paper roses that bloomed afresh every Passover. And yet Bear Belcovitch
had lived in much better styl