The Rise of David Levinsky Part 85

As he raised the first of the Four Cups of wine he said, solemnly, with an effort of shaking off all pretense of flippancy: "Well, let us raise our gla.s.ses. Let us drink the First Cup."

We all did so, and he added, "This is the Fourth of July of our unhappy people." After the gla.s.ses were drained and refilled he said: "Scenes like this bind us to the Jews of the whole world, and not only to those living, but to the past generations as well. This is no time for speaking of the Christian religion, but as I look at this wine an idea strikes me which I cannot help submitting: The Christians drink wine, imagining that it is the blood of Jesus.

Well, the wine we are drinking to-night reminds me of the martyr blood of our ma.s.sacred brethren of all ages."

Anna gave me a merry wink. I felt myself one of the family. I was in the seventh heaven. She seemed to be particularly attentive to me this evening

"I shall speak to her to-night," I decided. "I sha'n't wait another day." And the fact that she was a nationalist and not an unqualified socialist, like Elsie, for instance, seemed to me a new source of encouragement. I was in a quiver of blissful excitement

The Four Questions are usually asked by the youngest son, but Emil, the Internationalist, could not be expected to take an active part in the ceremony, so Sasha, the Zionist, took his place. Sasha, however, did not read Hebrew, and old Tevkin had to be content with having the Four Questions read in English, the general answer to them being given by Tevkin and myself in Hebrew. It reminded me of an operatic performance in which the part of Faust, for instance, is sung in French, while that of Margarita is performed in some other language. We went on with the Story of the Deliverance. Tevkin made frequent pauses to explain and comment upon the text, often with a burst of oratory. Mrs. Tevkin and some of the children were obviously bored.

Gracie pleaded hunger

Finally the end of the first part of the story was reached and supper was served. It was a typical Pa.s.sover supper, with matzo b.a.l.l.s, and it was an excellent repast. Everybody was talkative and gay. I addressed some remarks to Anna, and she received them all cordially

By way of attesting her recognition of Pa.s.sover as a "national holiday" she was in festive array, wearing her newest dress, a garment of blue taffeta embroidered in old rose, with a crepe collar of gray. It mellowed the glow of her healthful pink complexion. She was the most beautiful creature at the table, excluding neither her picturesque younger brother nor her majestic old mother. She shone. She flooded my soul with ecstasy

Tevkin's religion was Judaism, Zionism. Mine was Anna. The second half of the story is usually read with less pomp and circ.u.mstance than the first, many a pa.s.sage in it being often skipped altogether. So Tevkin dismissed us all, remaining alone at the table to chant the three final ballads, which he had characterized to his children as "charming bits of folk-lore."

When Mrs. Tevkin, the children, and myself were mounting the stairs leading up from the dining-room, I was by Anna's side, my nerves as taut as those of a soldier waiting for the command to charge. I charged sooner than I expected.

"Sasha asked the Four Questions," I found myself saying. "There is one question which I should like to ask of you, Miss Tevkin."

I said it so simply and at a moment so little suited to a proposal of marriage that the trend of my words was lost upon her

"Something about Jewish nationalism?" she asked

"About that and about something else."

We were pa.s.sing through the hallway now. When we entered the library I took her into a corner, and before we were seated I said: "Well, my question has really nothing to do with nationalism. It's quite another thing I want to ask of you. Don't refuse me. Marry me. Make me happy."

She listened like one stunned

"I am terribly in love with you," I added

"Oh!" she then exclaimed. Her delicate pink skin became a fiery red. She looked down and shook her head with confused stiffness.

"I see you're taken aback. Take a seat; get your bearings," I said, lightly, pulling up a chair that stood near by, "and say, 'Yes.'"

"Why, that's impossible!" she said, with an awkward smile, without seating herself. "I need not tell you that I have long since changed my mind about you--"

"I am no more repellent, am I?" I jested

"No. Not at all," she returned, with another smile. "But what you say is quite another thing. I am very sorry, indeed." She made to move away from me, but I checked her

"That does not discourage me," I said. "I'll just go on loving you and waiting for a favorable answer. You are still unjust to me.

You don't know me well enough. Anyhow, I can't give you up. I won't give you up. ("That's it," I thought. "I am speaking like a man of firm purpose.") "I am resolved to win you."

"Oh, that's entirely out of the question," she said, with a gesture of impatience and finality. And, bursting into tears of child-like indignation, she added: "Father a.s.sured me you would never hint at such a thing--never.

If you mean to persist, then--"

The sentence was left eloquently unfinished. She turned away, walked over to her mother and took a seat by her side, like a little girl mutely seeking her mamma's protection

The room seemed to be in a whirl. I felt the cold perspiration break out on my forehead. I was conscious of Mrs. Tevkin's and Elsie's glances. I was sick at heart. Anna's bitter resentment was a black surprise to me. I had a crus.h.i.+ng sense of final defeat

BOOK XIV

EPISODES OF A LONELY LIFE

CHAPTER I

IT was a severe blow. It caused me indescribable suffering. It would not have been unnatural to attribute my fiasco to my age. Had I been ten years younger, Anna's att.i.tude toward me might have been different. But this point of view I loathed to accept. Instead, I put the blame on Anna's environment.

"I was in the 'enemy's country' there," I would muse. "The atmosphere around her was against me." I hated the socialists with a novel venom. Finally I pulled myself together. Then it was that I discovered the real condition of my affairs. I had gone into those speculations far deeper than I could afford. There were indications that made me seriously uneasy. Things were even worse than Bender imagined. Ruin stared me in the face. I was panic-stricken.

One day I had the head of a large woolen concern lunch with me in a private dining-room of a well-known hotel. He was dignifiedly steel-gray and he had the appearance of a college professor or successful physician rather than of a business man. He liked me. I had long been one of his most important customers and I had always sought to build up a good record with him. For example: other cloak-manufacturers would exact allowances for merchandise that proved to have some imperfection. I never do so.

It is the rule of my house never to put in a claim for such things. In the majority of cases the goods can be cut so as to avoid any loss of material, and if it cannot, I will sustain the small loss rather than incur the mill's disfavor. In the long run it pays. And so this cloth merchant was well disposed toward me. He had done me some favors before. He addressed me as Dave. (There was a note of condescension as well as of admiration in this "Dave" of his. It implied that I was a shrewd fellow and an excellent customer, singularly successful and reliable, but that I was his inferior, all the same--a Jew, a social pariah. At the bottom of my heart I considered myself his superior, finding an amusing discrepancy between his professorial face and the crudity of his intellectual interests; but he was a Gentile, and an American, and a much wealthier man than I, so I looked up to him.) To make my appeal as effective as possible I initiated him into the human side of my troubles. I told him of my unfortunate courts.h.i.+p as well as of the real-estate ventures into which it had led me

He was interested and moved, and, as he had confidence in me, he granted my request at once.

"It's all right, Dave," he said, slapping my back, a queer look in his eye.

"You can always count on me. Only throw that girl out of your mind."

I grasped his hand silently. I wanted to say something, but the words stuck in my throat. He helped me out of my difficulties and I devoted myself to the cloak business with fresh energy. The agonies of my love for Anna were more persistent than those I had suffered after I moved out of Dora's house.

But, somehow, instead of interfering with my business activities, these agonies stimulated them. I was like the victim of a toothache who seeks relief in hard work. I toiled day and night, entering into the minutest detail of the business and performing duties that were ordinarily left to some inferior employee.

Business was good. Things went humming. Bender, who now had an interest in my factory, was happy

Some time later the same woolen man who had come to my a.s.sistance did me another good turn, one that brought me a rich harvest of profits. A certain weave was in great vogue that season, the demand far exceeding the output, and it so happened that the mill of the man with the professorial face was one of the very few that produced that fabric. So he let me have a much larger supply of it than any other cloak-manufacturer in the country was able to obtain. My business then took a great leap, while my overhead expenses remained the same. My net profits exceeded two hundred thousand dollars that year

One afternoon in the summer of the same year, as I walked along Broadway in the vicinity of Ca.n.a.l Street, my attention was attracted by a shabby, white-haired, feeble-looking old peddler, with a wide, sneering mouth, who seemed disquietingly familiar and in whom I gradually recognized one of my Antomir teachers--one of those who used to punish me for the sins of their other pupils. The past suddenly sprang into life with detailed, colorful vividness. The black pit of poverty in which I had been raised; my misery at school, where I had been treated as an outcast and a scapegoat because my mother could not afford even the few pennies that were charged for my tuition; the joy of my childish existence in spite of that gloom and martyrdom--all this rose from the dead before me

The poor old peddler I now saw trying to cross Broadway was Shmerl the Pincher, the man with whom my mother had a pinching and hair-pulling duel after she found the marks of his cruelty on my young body. He had been one of the most heartless of my tormentors, yet it was so thrillingly sweet to see him in New York! In my schooldays I would dream of becoming a rich and influential man and wreaking vengeance upon my brutal teachers, more especially upon Shmerl the Pincher and "the Cossack," the man whose little daughter, Sarah-Leah, had been the heroine of my first romance. I now rushed after Shmerl, greatly excited, one of the feelings in my heart being a keen desire to help him

A tangle of wagons and trolley-cars caused me some delay. I stood gazing at him restively as he picked his weary way. I had known him as a young man, although to my childish eye he had looked old--a strong fellow, probably of twenty-eight, with jet-black side-whiskers and beard, with bright, black eyes and alert movements. At the time I saw him on Broadway he must have been about sixty, but he looked much older

As I was thus waiting impatiently for the cars to start so that I could cross the street and greet him, a cold, practical voice whispered to me: "Why court trouble? Leave him alone."

My exaltation was gone. The spell was broken.

The block was presently relieved, but I did not stir. Instead of crossing the street and accosting the old man, I stood still, following him with my eyes until he vanished from view. Then I resumed my walk up Broadway. As I trudged along, a feeling of compunction took hold of me. By way of defending myself before my conscience, I tried to think of the unmerited beatings he used to give me. But it was of no avail. The idea of avenging myself on this decrepit, tattered old peddler for what he had done more than thirty years before made me feel small. "Poor devil! I must help him," I said to myself.

I was conscious of a desire to go back and to try to overtake him; but I did not. The desire was a meandering, sluggish sort of feeling. The spell was broken irretrievably