Ghetto Comedies Part 44

How could that obscure rush-light of the London Ghetto Theatre have blazed into the Star of Paris and New York?

This Lent-keeping demoiselle the little Polish Jewess who had munched Pa.s.sover cake at his table in the far-off happy days! This gilded idol the impecunious Gittel he had caressed!

'You ever seen this Yvonne Rupert?' he inquired of his neighbour, a pock-marked, spectacled young woman, who, as record-breaker of the establishment, had refused to join the strike of the mere hundred-and-fifty a day.

The young woman swiftly drew a knife from the wooden pail beside her, and deftly sc.r.a.ped at a rough hinge as she replied: 'No, but I guess she's the actress who gets all the flowers, and won't pay for 'em.'

He saw she had mixed up the two lawsuits, but the description seemed to hit off his Gittel to the life. Yes, Gittel had always got all the flowers of life, and dodged paying. Ah, she had always been diabolically clever, unscrupulously ambitious! Who could put bounds to her achievement? She had used him and thrown him away--without a word, without a regret. She had washed her hands of him as light-heartedly as he washed his of the dirty, sticky day's paste. What other 'pious philanthropist' had she found to replace him? Whither had she fled?

Why not to Paris that her theatric gifts might receive training?

This chic, this witchery, with which reputation credited her--had not Gittel possessed it all? Had not her heroines enchanted the Ghetto?

Oh, but this was a wild day-dream, insubstantial as the smoke-wreaths of the Yvonne Rupert cigar!

III

But the obsession persisted. In his miserable attic off Hester Street--that recalled the attic he had found her in, though it was many stories nearer the sky--he warmed himself with Gittel's image, smiling, light-darting, voluptuous. Night and sleep surrendered him to grotesque combinations--Gittel Goldstein smoking cigarettes in a bath-room, Yvonne Rupert playing Yiddish heroines in a little chapel.

In the clear morning these absurdities were forgotten in the realized absurdity of the initial identification. But a forenoon at the pasting-desk brought back the haunting thought. At noon he morbidly expended his lunch-dime on an 'Yvonne Rupert' cigar, and smoked it with a semi-insane feeling that he was repossessing his Gittel.

Certainly it was delicious.

He wandered into the box-making room, where the man who tended the witty nail-driving machine was seated on a stack of Mexican cedar-wood, eating from a package of sausage and sc.r.a.pple that sent sobering whiffs to the reckless smoker.

'You ever seen this Yvonne Rupert?' he asked wistfully.

'Might as well ask if I'd smoked her cigar!' grumbled the nailer through his mouthfuls.

'But there's a gallery at Webster and Dixie's.'

'Su-er!'

'I guess I'll go some day, just for curiosity.'

But the great Yvonne, he found, was flaming in her provincial orbit.

So he must needs wait.

Meantime, on a Sat.u.r.day night, with a dirty two-dollar bill in his pocket, and jingling some odd cents, he lounged into the restaurant where the young Russian bloods a.s.sembled who wrote for the Yiddish Labour papers, and 'knew it all.' He would draw them out about Yvonne Rupert. He established himself near a table at which long-haired, long-fingered Freethinkers were drinking chocolate and discussing La.s.salle.

'Ah, but the way he jumped on a table when only a schoolboy to protest against the master's injustice to one of his schoolfellows!

How the divine fire flamed in him!'

They talked on, these clamorous sceptics, amplifying the La.s.salle legend, broidering it with Messianic myths, with the same fantastic Oriental invention that had illuminated the plain Pentateuch with imaginative vignettes, and transfiguring the dry abstractions of Socialism with the same pa.s.sionate personalization. He listened impatiently. He had never been caught by Socialism, even at his hungriest. He had once been an employer himself, and his point of view survived.

They talked of the woman through whom La.s.salle had met his death. One of them had seen her on the American stage--a bouncing burlesque actress.

'Like Yvonne Rupert?' he ventured to interpose.

'Yvonne Rupert?' They laughed. 'Ah, if Yvonne had only had such a snap!' cried Melchitsedek Pinchas. 'To have jilted La.s.salle and been died for! What an advertis.e.m.e.nt!'

'It would have been on the bill,' agreed the table.

He asked if they thought Yvonne Rupert clever.

'Off the stage! There's nothing to her on,' said Pinchas.

The table roared as if this were a good joke. 'I dare say she would play my Ophelia as well as Mrs. Goldwater,' Pinchas added zestfully.

'They say she has a Yiddish accent,' Elkan ventured again.

The table roared louder. 'I have heard of Yiddish-Deutsch,' cried Pinchas, 'never of Yiddish-Francais!'

Elkan Mandle was frozen. By his disappointment he knew that he had been hoping to meet Gittel again--that his resentment was dead.

IV

But the hope would not die. He studied the theatrical announcements, and when Yvonne Rupert once again flashed upon New York he set out to see her. But it struck him that the remote seat he could afford--for it would not do to spend a week's wage on the mere chance--would be too far off for precise identification, especially as she would probably be theatrically transmogrified. No, a wiser as well as a more economical plan would be to meet her at the stage-door, as he used to meet Gittel. He would hang about till she came.

It was a long ride to the Variety Theatre, and, the weather being sloppy, there was not even standing-room in the car, every foot of which, as it plunged and heaved s.h.i.+p-like through the watery night, was a suffocating jam of human beings, wedged on the seats, or clinging tightly to the overhead straps, or swarming like stuck flies on the fore and hind platforms, the squeeze and smell intensified by the shovings and writhings of damp pa.s.sengers getting in and out, or by the desperate wriggling of the poor patient collector of fares boring his way through the very thick of the soldered ma.s.s. Elkan alighted with a headache, glad even of the cold rain that sprinkled his forehead. The s.h.i.+ning carriages at the door of the theatre filled him for once with a bitter revolt. But he dared not insinuate himself among the white-wrapped, scented women and elegant cloaked men, though he itched to enter the portico and study the pictures of Yvonne Rupert, of which he caught a glimpse. He found his way instead to the stage-door, and took up a position that afforded him a complete view of the comers and goers, if only partial shelter from the rain.

But the leaden hours pa.s.sed without her, with endless fevers of expectation, heats followed by chills. The performers came and went, mostly on foot, and strange nondescript men and women pa.s.sed too through the jealously-guarded door.

He was drenched to the skin with acc.u.mulated drippings ere a smart brougham drove up, a smart groom opened an umbrella, and a smart--an unimaginably smart--Gittel Goldstein alighted.

Yes, the incredible was true!

Beneath that coquettish veil, under the aureole of hair, gleamed the piquant eyes he had kissed so often.

He remained petrified an instant, dazed and staring. She pa.s.sed through the door the groom held open. The doorkeeper, from his pigeon-hole, handed her some letters. Yes, he knew every trick of the shoulders, every turn of the neck. She stood surveying the envelopes.

As the groom let the door swing back and turned away, he rushed forward and pushed it open again.

'Gittel!' he cried chokingly. 'Gittel!'

She turned with a quick jerk of the head, and in her flushed, startled face he read consciousness if not recognition. The reek of her old cherry-blossom smote from her costlier garments, kindling a thousand pa.s.sionate memories.

'Knowest thou me not?' he cried in Yiddish.

In a flash her face, doubly veiled, was a haughty stare.

'Who is zis person?' she asked the doorkeeper in her charming French-English.

He reverted to English.

'I am Elkan, your own Elkan!'

Ah, the jostle of sweet and bitter memories. So near, so near again!

The same warm seductive witch. He strove to take her daintily-gloved hand.