The Diamond Waterfall Read online

  THE DIAMOND WATERFALL

  by

  Pamela Haines

  Contents

  Prologue: June 1887

  Part One: 1897–1918

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Two:1922-Chapter 1945

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Prologue

  June 1887

  She screamed. Then again, but much louder. As loud as she could. Just standing there, scream after scream. Then, her throat rasped, she battered her fists against the bedroom door—pulling at the doorknob, rattling it, straining at the lock.

  But no one, none of her family, came to protest. She must be alone in the house. It was stifling in the room—hot, stifling air. Helpless with anger, she walked over to the window. Then back to the door. It seemed to her suddenly that the room had grown smaller, the door thicker. A bedroom that she had known for at least ten of her seventeen years. Now it was her prison. The door—a dungeon door.

  “Let me out!” She banged again, shouting. “I want to come out! I shall be an actress, I shall. You shan’t stop me. I’ll go on the stage—I will, I will.” She drew breath. Then: “You’ll have to let me out for the Jubilee. I shall petition Queen Victoria. She wouldn’t want her loyal subject imprisoned. And anyway, it’s against the law, there’s something called habeas corpus, you can’t keep someone shut up…. Air, I want air!”

  The window was open, just a crack. Only—it was barred. Right to the very top. Bars that had been put there for the childrens’ protection when the room had been a nursery for the four girls: Daisy, Ethel, Lily, Amy, the little daughters of Alfred Greenwood, founder of a chain of grocery shops serving the clothing trade of Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

  Big daughters now, though. Except for Amy, dead from scarlet fever. Daisy already married—but a runaway marriage, a family scandal. Daisy’s name must never be mentioned. Lily in disgrace too, locked in her bedroom. Until she comes to her senses, that is. Only eighteen-year-old Ethel in favor.

  She would be, Lily thought now, she would …

  “I want to go on the stage,” she had said, six long months ago now. “I want—”

  But she had said it without much hope. People like Dad didn’t struggle to make money and to live in a smart district of Leeds in order to have a daughter go off to a dangerous, flashy, immoral life. For that was how he saw it:

  “Never. Never, Lily. That I should ever see the day …” And Ma, who always agreed with him (who didn’t dare do otherwise), stout, soft Ma, who should have been a refuge, a lap to sit upon, a bosom to weep on, but who herself looked always in need of comfort—crumpled, creased, forever on the verge of tears:

  “You’ve upset your father now, Lily—with your foolish ideas. All we want for you is …”

  But Lily knew well enough what was wanted for her. And I shan’t be that sort of person, she thought. Ever. That suffocating life of bombazine, of predictability, where a visit to Scarborough was a great event. Where she too might marry someone like Dad, and then have four little daughters, and perhaps five years later, at last, a son. (Even if one as dear as her dear, dear brother, Harry.) And then to grow stout …

  No. It would not do. It would not do at all. When I might be out there on the stage, applauded by thousands—however humbly I have to begin. When I might go, shall go, to Paris. When life, through my own making, could always be exciting, exciting, exciting.

  Later, there had been the scene she didn’t want now to remember:

  “You think because I’ve spent money on you, lass—because your Dad’s spent money on you, you can do what you like now—eh, Lily? As if there’d not been trouble enough with Daisy, without we’ve this now. What’d folk say, eh? Alfred Greenwood’s lass, gone to join the lakers. … It’s no life for a lady.”

  And now, over and over, all through this Jubilee Week:

  “You’ll promise then? Give us your word, your mother and I, that it’s all done with. No more of this lock and key …”

  “I’ll promise nothing—”

  “You will—”

  “I’ll not—”

  “What’s that, eh? Say ‘Dad,’ ‘Father.’”

  “I’ll not— Dad. Father …”

  The indignity of the chamber pot, the one with the blue violets on it. She was going to need it any moment now. The chamber pot—for everything. It was as if she were ill. Ma hoped she was: only being poorly could make Lily behave like this, she told her. Ethel had said quite something else, but Ma had turned on her, and said she was lucky to be healthy, and it was no fault of Lily’s these ideas had overcome her.

  When she came in to see her, Ma’s eyes would fill with tears—and then Lily would very nearly give in. Ma had suffered enough over Daisy, she didn’t deserve all this unhappiness. If I had it in me, Lily thought, to promise …

  Downstairs, the piano had started up (the new cottage upright, a Schiedmayer and Soehne’s, seven-octave, in walnut, that Dad had paid a whole thirty-five pounds for at Ramsden’s). Ethel, who couldn’t tell a flat from a sharp, playing as if her fingers were croquet mallets. “Berceuse.” No baby would be rocked to sleep with that. …

  A knock on the door:

  “Lily—Lily. You there?” Harry’s voice. Full of love for his big sister.

  “Of course, daftie. How could—”

  “Lily, we’re back. I saw them—hussars, mounted police. Practicing, they were. There’s to be a twenty-one gun salute—”

  “Yes—and?”

  “Ma’s coming up in a little, Ethel too. Lily, I’ve on my new sailor suit. It’s got a lanyard and a whistle. And you know what, Lily? It’s meant for a lad of twelve—”

  “And you only nine…. Listen a moment, Harry—listen now. I want—”

  “Lily, there’s Ethel coming …” She heard him being pushed from his place at the keyhole.

  Ethel’s voice was breathy: “Ma’s on her way. She’ll have something to say to you. Or rather, Dad will. We heard you screaming when we came down the road. Folk’ll think you’re touched …”

  But Lily had only one thing to say to her sister:

  “I’m going to be an actress, Ethel—”

  “You’re acting now, Lily. What you’re doing
now in that bedroom, that’s acting…. You ought to do what Dad says. You know what happened to Daisy …”

  Lily said angrily, her mouth too near the keyhole, tasting the brassy flavor:

  “Marrying isn’t wrong—what if he doesn’t ever speak to her again? And anyway, Daisy married the man she loved. That’s not a sin in the eyes of God.”

  “But Father had said no. He forbade it—”

  “He’s not God the Father, is he? Is he?”

  “Lily, please … Anyway, marrying a Jew, fancy marrying a Jew, they’re awful those Jews here in Leeds. Common Polish people, Dad says. Taking the bread out of honest folk’s mouths. You know it …”

  But Lily didn’t know it. Not at all. She had been completely on Daisy’s side, from the very beginning. She was on the side altogether of the newly arrived Jewish community. Even more so now: now that she knew just a little, a very little, of what it was to be persecuted.

  Daisy’s drama had begun the day she went to help Mrs. Mandelbaum with her party. The Mandelbaums, who were not strict Orthodox Jews, had lived in Leeds for twenty or thirty years, and through wealth, charm, and kindness had become part of a wider social circle than was usual for Jews. Ada Thompson, who knew Herbert Varley, who was married to a Jewish girl, asked Daisy, one dank and drizzling November afternoon two years ago, to come with her to the Mandelbaums’.

  “It’s a party for refugees, I’ve promised to help hand round cakes—I’ve done it twice before. You’ll come, Daisy, won’t you?” And Daisy, the gentle, the endlessly kind, who never refused anyone anything (and yet was to show herself later so strong, so tenacious of purpose, so immovable in her loyalties), gave up whatever else she had planned—and went to meet her fate.

  The year was 1885. The first really large wave of Jewish immigrants had come in 1881 with the pogroms of Alexander III in Russia. They had been coming over steadily ever since, in spite of warnings about the difficulties of living in a foreign land—warnings given them by the English Jewish establishment.

  Many were from the Polish part of Russia. They would travel to Hamburg, then by boat to Hull, many of them intending to go on to Liverpool and from there to America. Frequently they hadn’t the money. What they did have was the word “Leeds,” often the only English word they knew, passed on to them by relatives who had been early immigrants. By the time of Mrs. Mandelbaum’s party, they were arriving at the rate of about fifty a month….

  Daisy knew little about them (Lily and Ethel even less) except that they were numerous and had formed by now a ghetto in the Leylands district of Leeds. Dad was rude about them (but who was he not rude about?) and there were notices in shop windows—jobs advertised with the message “No Jews need apply.” …

  About twenty boys and girls were at the party, ranging in age from ten to nineteen. Some had been coming to the Mandelbaums’ for a year or more and spoke a little English. Ada and Daisy’s task was to hand round food and to talk to those who could manage some conversation. Ada, because she had been before (the parties were held every month), showed off a little.

  “This way, Daisy. Over here is a girl who dances like a—wait till she does her piece…. That boy there, Stefan something or other, he plays the fiddle.”

  Three minutes later Daisy met Joszef. She told Lily afterward that from the first moment she saw him, she knew. “I just stood there, with the dish of fruit salad—staring. Till he smiled and took it straightway from me. And then he dared to start eating.”

  It was his beauty, she said. In spite of the ill-fitting clothes. His dark-shadowed face with its high cheekbones, the eyes, almost black, which she thought laughed at her, the hands with their long thin fingers: “I felt so pale and fluffy, Lily—beside him….”

  When the food was all served and before the entertainments began, she had gone over to speak to him. She discovered that he was nineteen (a year younger than she), that he came from the Kovno province of Poland, and had escaped with his widowed mother and two elder brothers and young sister. He was apprenticed to a jeweler and hoped to become a watchmaker.

  All this she learned from him, with the help of two girl immigrants, who laughed and blushed on either side of him. He himself was only a little shy— and obviously very proud of the English words he’d acquired in the few months since his arrival.

  Daisy had determined there and then that she would—somehow—see more of him. And in spite of being quiet compliant Daisy (so very, very unlike Lily), that was what she did.

  It hadn’t been too difficult at first. For three or four years now, Mrs. Mandelbaum had been giving free English classes in her home. She limited the numbers to those who wished to write and read as well as speak. So far natural selection had kept the group small enough to be manageable; usually it was filled from among those who came to her monthly entertainments. Rachel, Herbert Varley’s wife, had been helping since the very beginning.

  Daisy heard about the lessons that afternoon. When the tea party was almost over, and the singing and fiddle playing done, she went over to Joszef and very prettily told him that he must come to Mrs. Mandelbaum’s: “to make your English better and better.” Already he’d learned an unbelievable amount, she said. Here was a chance for him. Later she spoke directly to Rachel. She would like to teach. “Even though I’m not Jewish, I want to help these people.”

  She told Lily everything, but no one else except Aunt Millie, who was Ma’s older sister and the two girls’ greatest ally. (If she were alive now, Lily thought, I would not be in this sorry mess.) At home, Daisy said that she was helping with Sunday-school teaching. Neither Ma nor Dad were really interested. Aunt Millie went with her as chaperone, and kept her secret. Not that it was much of one then: discovery would have meant, at most, punishment and a diatribe against immigrants generally, with the chief worry what contagion she might have picked up. A litany of nits, ringworm, fleas, and unmentionables.

  But as the weeks and months passed, everything changed. Daisy was irrevocably, desperately, in love. And it was not, she told Lily, just her. From the blackboard where she or Rachel pointed—“take took taken”—their eyes met continually. When she corrected something with his pencil, their fingers touched.

  He stayed behind once and talked with her after class: then, every time. Aunt Millie looked unhappy. Daisy invited herself to his home, and he looked unhappy. Aunt Millie even unhappier. But she went, taking Aunt Millie with her. His mother spoke only Yiddish, his two brothers were suspicious of the visitors, the young sister hid and would not come out at all. An uncle from Hull, a cabinetmaker, visited while they were there. A great bald-headed man with a scar on his temple from a Cossack sword, three years in England, he spoke good English. The whole Ziolkiwiski family, it appeared, would like to have gone on to America. It seemed unlikely now.

  That was April, six months after their first meeting. In May, Daisy proposed. “I know it’s very forward—but otherwise, how? He can hardly ask Dad for my hand, can he?” Indeed, that very week, Dad had been holding forth again. “Yorkshire for Yorkshire folk,” he said three times in one evening after reading that immigration figures were up.

  Somehow, with Aunt Millie’s help, it had come all right—if being turned out, forbidden to see your sisters or brother, cut off without a penny, your name never to be mentioned at the family dinner table could be called that…. But she had her prince—triumphing first over his diffidence, her non-Jewishness (she had taken on his religion), the problems of his family, who did not know what to make of her. She had poverty too, and ostracism.

  For Dad, Joszef was no prince. He was—but Lily wanted to forget…. For the noise of that scene had filled the house. Daisy, seeking above all not to betray Aunt Millie, had stood her ground, trembling, white-faced. Sent up to bed in disgrace, she had left the house within the half hour, taking refuge first with Aunt Millie. Then, secure in the knowledge that she was of age by six weeks, she had become Mrs. Ziolkiwiski—and written to tell Dad so.

  The disgrace, the shame, h
ad been terrible. Ethel had taken her parents’ side. But little Harry had wept for his beloved sister’s absence and Lily had taken him secretly to visit her. Soon Daisy and Joszef would be moving to live in Hull with the uncle. This Christmas she expected a baby.

  Although Daisy’s name could not be mentioned, Dad was ruder than ever now about the immigrants. “Yorkshire for Yorkshire folk, let America have them…. They took the Paddies when I was a lad. In the Famine. Aye, let the Yankees have them.”

  Her bedtime drink. Tonight, June 20, the sixth night of her imprisonment. It was drugged. She was sure of it. The bottom of the cup was gritty. It might possibly be of course just a different, poorer type of cocoa, something Dad was trying out in the shops. But it made her feel odd, strange. “I do feel strange,” she said out loud. Perhaps her tantrum had worn her out. She had all day to sleep if she wished, but: I sleep less than ever, she thought.

  I am a prisoner. But no one can imprison my spirit. She tried to remember some poetry, any poetry, about prisons. But her mind kept going back to singing, dancing, acting….

  I am the Countess, no, the Princess Ludmila Hohenkopetal, imprisoned by my cruel stepfather because I wish to marry the impecunious Lieutenant Longlegs, who is really a king’s son in disguise. He hears me singing, and so learns where I am imprisoned. … He comes to my rescue. Rescue. Cue. Cue for a song. … It was difficult to invent a song for a princess. Maybe, in her nightgown, the gas fire turned down, the curtains drawn back, moonlight across the floor (and if they don’t like the noise, let them come and complain), she could sing….

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the famous ‘Jack-in-the-Box’ song as performed by Miss Fanny Leslie—”

  Her feet dragged. I am drugged, she thought … so feet drag…. Drugged, drug. Dragged. Best to lie down now.

  She dreamed—about the Golden Jubilee. She was in Leeds, in Duncan Street. The tram was coming toward her from Boar Lane. The people on top crowded, standing, hanging over the edge. The horses wore golden plumes, tossing gilt. Excitement filled the air. She thought, I’m glad I’m awake and not dreaming. A man, dressed poorly and without gold dust, stood near her. “What’s happening?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, she looked closer and saw that he was one of Joszef’s brothers. “We just arrived,” he said, “we are not stopping. We go to America, you know.” As the tram drew nearer the crowd could be heard cheering. “Who is it,” she asked urgently, “who are they, what is it?”