The only person who looked at the host was the hostess. Her look was one of approval—it could not be of æsthetic approval, like the look Percy Saville devoted to herself, for her husband was a cadaverous little man with prominent ears and teeth.
'And if Mr. Graham should ever join us on the Council of the United Synagogue,' added Montagu Samuels, addressing the table generally, 'he will discover that there is no communal problem with which we do not loyally grapple.'
'No, thank you,' said Sidney with a shudder. 'When I visit Raphael, I sometimes pick up a Jewish paper and amuse myself by reading the debates of your public bodies. I understand most of your verbiage is edited away,' he looked Montagu Samuels full in the face, with audacious naïveté; 'but there is enough left to show that our monotonous group of public men consists of narrow-minded mediocrities. The chief public work they appear to do, outside finance, is, when public exams. fall on Sabbaths or holidays, getting special dates for Jewish candidates, to whom these examinations are the avenues to atheism. They never see the joke. How can they? Why, they take even themselves seriously.'
'Oh, come!' said Miss Cissy Levine indignantly. 'You often see "laughter" in the reports.'
'That must mean the speaker was laughing,' explained Sidney, 'for you never see anything to make the audience laugh. I appeal to Mr. Montagu Samuels.'
'It is useless discussing a subject with a man who admittedly speaks without knowledge,' replied that gentleman with dignity.
'Well, how do you expect me to get the knowledge?' grumbled Sidney. 'You exclude the public from your gatherings—I suppose to prevent them rubbing shoulders with the swells, the privilege of being snubbed by whom is the reward of public service. Wonderfully practical idea that—to utilise snobbery as a communal force! The United Synagogue is founded on it. Your community coheres through it.'
'There you are scarcely fair,' said the hostess, with a charming smile of reproof. 'Of course there are snobs amongst us, but is it not the same in all sects?'
'Emphatically not,' said Sidney. 'If one of our swells sticks to a shred of Judaism, people seem to think the God of Judah should be thankful; and if he goes to synagogue once or twice a year, it is regarded as a particular condescension to the Creator.'
'The mental attitude you caricature is not so snobbish as it seems,' said Raphael Leon, breaking into the conversation for the first time. 'The temptations to the wealthy and the honoured to desert their struggling brethren are manifold, and sad experience has made our race accustomed to the loss of its brightest sons.'
'Thanks for the compliment, fair coz,' said Sidney, not without a complacent cynical pleasure in the knowledge that Raphael spoke truly, that he owed his own immunity from the obligations of the faith to his artistic success, and that the outside world was disposed to accord him a larger charter of morality on the same grounds. 'But if you can only deny nasty facts by accounting for them, I dare say Mr. Armitage's book will afford you ample opportunities for explanation. Or have Jews the brazenness to assert it is all invention?'
'No; no one would do that,' said Percy Saville, who had just done it. 'Certainly, there is a good deal of truth in the sketch of the ostentatious, over-dressed Johnsons, who, as everybody knows, are meant for the Jonases.'
'Oh yes,' said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith. 'And it's quite evident that the stockbroker who drops half his h's, and all his poor acquaintances, and believes in one Lord, is no other than Joel Friedman.'
'And the house where people drive up in broughams for supper and solo-whist after the theatre is the Davises', in Maida Vale,' said Miss Cissy Levine.
'Yes, the book's true enough,' began Mrs. Montagu Samuels. She stopped suddenly, catching her husband's eye, and the colour heightened on her florid cheek. 'What I say is,' she concluded awkwardly, 'he ought to have come among us, and shown the world a picture of the cultured Jews.'
'Quite so, quite so!' said the hostess. Then, turning to the tall, thoughtful-looking young man who had hitherto contributed but one remark to the conversation, she said, half in sly malice, half to draw him out: 'Now you, Mr. Leon, whose culture is certified by our leading University, what do you think of this latest portrait of the Jew?'
'I don't know; I haven't read it,' replied Raphael apologetically.
'No more have I,' murmured the table generally.
'I wouldn't touch it with a pitchfork,' said Miss Cissy Levine.
'I think it's a shame they circulate it at the libraries,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels. 'I just glanced over it at Mrs. Hugh Marston's house. It's vile. There are actually Jargon words in it. Such vulgarity!'
'Shameful!' murmured Percy Saville; 'Mr. Lazarus was telling me about it. It's plain treachery and disloyalty, this putting of weapons into the hands of our enemies. Of course we have our faults, but we should be told of them privately or from the pulpit.'
'That would be just as efficacious,' said Sidney admiringly.
'More efficacious,' said Percy Saville unsuspiciously. 'A preacher speaks with authority, but this penny-a-liner——'
'With truth?' queried Sidney.
Saville stopped, disgusted, and the hostess answered Sidney half coaxingly.
'Oh, I am sure you can't think that. The book is so one-sided. Not a word about our generosity, our hospitality, our domesticity—the thousand and one good traits all the world allows us.'
'Of course not; since all the world allows them, it was unnecessary,' said Sidney.
'I wonder the Chief Rabbi doesn't stop it,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels.
'My dear, how can he?' inquired her husband. 'He has no control over the publishing trade.'
'He ought to talk to the man,' persisted Mrs. Samuels.
'But we don't even know who he is,' said Percy Saville; 'probably "Edward Armitage" is only a nom de plume. You'd be surprised to learn the real names of some of the literary celebrities I meet about.'
'Oh, if he's a Jew you may be sure it isn't his real name,' laughed Sidney. It was characteristic of him that he never spared a shot, even when himself hurt by the kick of the gun. Percy coloured slightly, unmollified by being in the same boat with the satirist.
'I have never seen the name in the subscription lists,' said the hostess with ready tact.
'There is an Armitage who subscribes two guineas a year to the Board of Guardians,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels. 'But his Christian name is George.'
'"Christian" name is distinctly good for "George,"' murmured Sidney.
'There was an Armitage who sent a cheque to the Russian Fund,' said Mr. Henry Goldsmith; 'but that can't be an author: it was quite a large cheque!'
'I am sure I have seen Armitage among the Births, Marriages, and Deaths,' said Miss Cissy Levine.
'How well read they all are in the national literature!' Sidney murmured to Addie.
Indeed, the sectarian advertisements served to knit the race together, counteracting the unravelling induced by the fashionable dispersion of Israel, and waxing the more important as the other links, the old traditional jokes, bywords, ceremonies, card-games, prejudices, and tunes, which are more important than laws and more cementatory than ideals, were disappearing before the over-zealousness of a parvenu refinement that had not yet attained to self-confidence. The Anglo-Saxon stolidity of the West-End synagogue service, on week days entirely given over to paid praying-men, was a typical expression of the universal tendency to exchange the picturesque primitiveness of the Orient for the sobrieties of fashionable civilisation. When Jeshurun waxed fat, he did not always kick, but he yearned to approximate as much as possible to John Bull without merging in him; to sink himself and yet not be absorbed—not to be, and yet to be. The attempt to realise the asymptote in human mathematics was not quite successful, too near an approach to John Bull generally assimilating Jeshurun away. For such