Israel Rank — Key Ideas to Explore

ove the wail of an infant. He was obliged to catch hold of the bannisters, for his heart leapt into his mouth and nearly suffocated him.

He sat down on the stairs to recover himself, while the tears of joy and pride welled into his tired eyes and flowed down his faded cheeks.

The doctor on his way downstairs nearly fell over him.

“Come, come, Mr. Rank, you must bear up. ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’”

Apparently the doctor was condoling from force of habit. The speech was certainly alarming, and my father whitened.

“Mother and child, Mr. Rank, both doing well. It’s a boy.”

The alarm disappeared from his face. He was a father at last. “An Isaac was born unto him.”

“May I go up?” he asked timidly.

“Most certainly, but be careful not to excite the patient.”

My father went upstairs and knocked nervously. The nurse opened the door holding me in her arms. It is to my father’s credit, however, that he hardly cast a look at the desire of their married life, but crossed at once to the bed.

My poor mother looked up tenderly and lovingly at the dowdy little figure bending over her, and smiled.

“It’s a boy,” she whispered, and then added: “We wanted a boy.”

My father pressed her hand gently, but remembering the doctor’s instructions not to excite the patient kissed her lips and stole gently out to look at his first, though somewhat late, born. A puckered face, to which the blood rushed spasmodically, clouding it almost to the suggestion of apoplexy, was all he could see. My father looked down at me and saw that I was dark. I could not well have been otherwise if he were to believe himself my father, for he was Jewish from the crown of his well-shaped head to the soles of his rather large feet.

If my mother is to be credited, he was when she fell in love with him a singularly handsome little man, but at the time of my birth the physical blight which falls on nearly all men of our race towards middle age was upon him.

She possessed a small cabinet photograph of him, taken when such things were a novelty. In early years I was accustomed—misled by the out-of-date clothes—to regard it as a very frumpish affair indeed. When I grew up I came to think otherwise: for one day, placing my hand over the offending clothes, there looked out at me a face which, granting the wonderful complexion which my mother always insisted he possessed, was singularly handsome and very like my own.

I only remember him as a faded little creature, who had run to stomach to an extent which was absurd, especially when it was contrasted with the extreme thinness of the rest of his body. He was a commercial traveller, and always attributed this inharmonious excrescence on an otherwise slim form to the amount of aerated waters he was obliged to mix with those drinks the taking of which was indispensable to his calling.

My mother was dark too, so it was little wonder that such hair as I had when I was born was of the blackest imaginable hue, as likewise were my eyes.

“He’s a beautiful baby; a bit small, but beautiful,” said the nurse.

My father, who could not at the moment dissociate my appearance from Mr. Darwin’s theory of the origin of species, tried to believe her, and stole downstairs, where he made his own tea and boiled himself a couple of eggs. A meat pie with the unbaked crust lying beside it suggested that I had arrived quite unexpectedly, as indeed had been the case. This perhaps accounted for the fact that as a baby I was weakly.

Before the first year of my life was over, my doting parents had gone through many an agony of suspense, and my father had more than once slackened his steps on returning home after his day’s work, fearing to enter the house lest my mother should meet him and weeping inform him that the tiny thread of life, by which I was alone prevented from flying away and becoming a little angel, had snapped.

But by dint of the greatest care from a mother, who, whatever may have been her coldness to the outside world, possessed a burning affection for her husband and child, I was brought safely to my first birthday.