She therefore abandoned Agnes, but whilst she mechanically performed the actions of cooking the dinner her mind continued to work furiously, racing against time. When Brodie came in she served the meal without once removing her fierce concentration from the problem that obsessed her, and with such unusual abstraction that she placed before Brodie, in mistake, Nessie's small plate.
"Are ye drunk, woman?" he roared at her, gazing at the diminutive portion. "Or am I expected to repeat the miracle o' the loaves and fishes?"
As she hastily changed the plates Mamma blushed guiltily at this outward manifestation of her secret cogitations; but how could she have said, in extenuation, "I was thinking of how I could raise forty pounds for Matt?"
''She'll have been takin' a wee sook at the bottle to keep her strength up," tittered Grandma Brodie maliciously. "That's how she'll have been passin' the time this mornin'."
"So that's where the money for the house goes," sneered Brodie, taking up his mother's lead; " in tipple! Well, we maun see what's to be done about that."
"Maybe that's what's gie'n her that red neb and watery een, I'm thinkin'," replied the old woman.
Nessie said nothing, but her too obvious side glances of fealty and cooperation towards Mamma were so pregnant with meaning that they almost defeated their object. Still, the crisis was not precipitated and, after dinner, when Brodie had departed and the old woman retreated upstairs, Mamma breathed more freely, and turning to Nessie, said:
"Will you clear up, dear? I've got to go out for a few messages. You're a great help to Mamma to-day, and if you've got the dishes washed when I come back, I'll bring you a pennyworth of sweeties."
In her awful dilemma she was capable even of subtle strategy in a small matter like this and, although the rain had ceased, Nessie consented willingly, lured by the bait of sweetmeats, charmed to be recognised by her mother as so supremely grown up.
Mrs. Brodie put on a hat and coat, the latter the very paletot she had worn when she escorted Matt to Glasgow on his departure, and hurried out of the house. She quickly crossed the Common and took the road which ran behind the station; then, at the junction of Railway Road and College Street, she paused outside a small, low- browed shop which bore above the crooked lintel of its doorway the disreputable insignia of three brass balls. Upon the window was a notice which stated in dirty white letters, and, through the defection of certain letters and the broken condition of others, with some uncertainty: Gold, Silver, Old False Teeth Bought, Money Lent; whilst behind this, chalked on a small, unprosperous-looking slate, was the terser and less prepossessing phrase: Rags Bought. With a
fearful misgiving Mrs. Brodie contemplated this, the only pawnshop in the respectable Borough of Lcvcnf ord. To enter these precincts was, she knew, the most abysmal humiliation to which a respectable person could descend; and the greater crime of being detected entering therein meant disgrace, dishonour and social annihilation. She realised all this, realised further her inability to cope with the hidden horrors within, yet she compressed her lips and glided bravely into the shop, as quickly and unsubstantially as a shadow. Only the loud, revealing tinkle of the bell attached to the door marked her entry, and surrounded by its mellifluous reiterations she found herself facing a counter in a small box-like compartment which appeared to be one of three. Here the number three had apparently a cabalistic significance both without and within, yet in the compartment she was more private than she could have hoped. Even in this debased society there were apparently instincts of delicacy! When the tinkle of the bell had ceased, her nostrils became gradually and oppressively aware of an odour, emerging permeatingly from some unseen point, of boiling fat tinctured with the aroma of onions. With a sudden faintness at the greasy, nauseating odour, she closed her eyes, and when she opened them a moment later, a short, squat man magically confronted her, having issued unseen, like a genie, from behind the heavy opaque cloud of vapour that filled the inner shop. He had a long, square beard, iron grey and slightly curling, bushy eyebrows of the same colour and texture, beneath which bright, beady eyes twinkled like a bird's; his hands and shoulders moved deferentially, but these black pellets of eyes never left Mrs. Brodie's face. He was a Polish Jew whose settlement in Levenford could be adduced only to his racial proclivity for courting adversity and who, failing to eke out an existence by usury in the hard soil of the Borough, was reduced to merely subsisting so so it seemed by the buying and selling of rags. Being mild and inoffensive, he did not resent the abusive epithets which greeted him as, shouting, "Any rag anybone! any-bottle to-day!", he drove his donkey care upon his rounds; and he made no complaints except to bewail, to such as would hear him, the absence of a synagogue in the town.
"Yeth?" he now lisped to Mrs. Brodie.
"You lend money," she gasped.
"Vot you vont to pawn?" he thrust at her. Although his voice was gentle, she was startled at such crudity of expression.
"I've nothing here now. I wanted to borrow forty pounds."
He glanced sideways at her, regarding her rusty, unfashionable clothing, her rough hands and broken nails, the tarnish on the thin, worn, gold band of her solitary ring, her ludicrous battered hat missing, with his glittering eyes, no item of her sad and worthless attire. He thought she must be mad. Caressing his fleshy, curved nose between his finger and thumb he said thoughtfully:
"Zat es a lot of monesh. Ve must ave security. You must bring gold or jewels if you vish to raise zat amount."
She should, of course, have had jewels! In her novels these were the touchstone of a lady's security, but, apart from her wedding ring, she had only her mother's silver watch which she might, with good fortune, have pledged for fifteen shillings and, realising something of the insufficiency of her position she faltered:
"You would not lend it on my furniture or or on note of hand. I saw in the papers some people do that, do they not?"
He continued to rub his nose, considering, beneath his benignly tallowed brow, that these Gentile women were all alike scraggy and worn and stupid. Did she not realise that his business was conducted on the basis of shillings, not of pounds? And that, though he could produce the sum she required, he would require security and interest which he had realised at his initial survey to be utterly beyond her? He shook his head, gently but finally, and said, without ceasing to be conciliatory, using indeed, to that end his deprecating hands:
"Ve don't do zat beesness. Try a bigger firm say en ze ceety. Oh, ye! Zey might do et. Zey have more monesh zan a poor man like me."
She regarded him with a palpitating heart in stunned, humiliated silence, having braved the danger and suffered the indignity of entering his wretched hovel without achieving her purpose. Yet she was obliged to accept his decision she had no appeal and she was out once more in the dirty street amongst the puddles, the littered tin cans and the garbage in the gutter, without having procured even one of the forty pounds she required. She was utterly abased and humiliated yet, as she walked quickly away, she appreciated with a growing anxiety that, though she had achieved nothing, Matt would at this very moment be waiting in immediate anticipation of the arrival of the money. Lowering her umbrella over her face to avoid detection, she hastened her steps feverishly towards home.
Nessie awaited her in a small imitation apron, triumphantly playing the housewife over her neat pile of clean crockery, preparing herself for her just reward of sweetmeats, but Mamma thrust her roughly aside.