IN THE GRIP OF HIS PAST.
Jake had never even vaguely abandoned the idea of supplying his wife
and child with the means of coming to join him. He was more or less
prompt in remitting her monthly allowance of ten rubles, and the visit
to the draft and passage office had become part of the routine of his
life. It had the invariable effect of arousing his dormant scruples,
and he hardly ever left the office without ascertaining the price of a
steerage voyage from Hamburg to New York. But no sooner did he emerge
from the dingy basement into the noisy scenes of Essex Street, than he
would consciously let his mind wander off to other topics.
Formerly, during the early part of his sojourn in Boston, his landing
place, where some of his townsfolk resided and where he had passed his
first two years in America, he used to mention his Gitl and his Yosselé
so frequently and so enthusiastically, that some wags among the Hanover
Street tailors would sing "Yekl and wife and the baby" to the tune of
Molly and I and the Baby. In the natural course of things, however,
these retrospective effusions gradually became far between, and since
he had shifted his abode to New York he carefully avoided all reference
to his antecedents. The Jewish quarter of the metropolis, which is a
vast and compact city within a city, offers its denizens incomparably
fewer chances of contact with the English-speaking portion of the
population than any of the three separate Ghettos of Boston. As a
consequence, since Jake's advent to New York his passion for American
sport had considerably cooled off. And, to make up for this, his
enthusiastic nature before long found vent in dancing and in a general
life of gallantry. His proved knack with the gentle sex had turned his
head and now cost him all his leisure time. Still, he would
occasionally attend some variety show in which boxing was the main
drawing card, and somehow managed to keep track of the salient events
of the sporting world generally. Judging from his unstaid habits and
happy-go-lucky abandon to the pleasures of life, his present associates
took it for granted that he was single, and instead of twitting him
with the feigned assumption that he had deserted a family--a piece of
burlesque as old as the Ghetto--they would quiz him as to which of his
girls he was "dead struck" on, and as to the day fixed for the wedding.
On more than one such occasion he had on the tip of his tongue the
seemingly jocular question, "How do you know I am not married already?"
But he never let the sentence cross his lips, and would, instead,
observe facetiously that he was not "shtruck on nu goil," and that he
was dead struck on all of them in "whulshale." "I hate retail beesnesh,
shee? Dot'sh a' kin' a man _I_ am!" One day, in the course of an
intimate conversation with Joe, Jake, dropping into a philosophical
mood, remarked:
"It's something like a baker, _ain't it_? The more _cakes_ he has the
less he likes them. You and I have a _lot_ of girls; that's why we
don't _care_ for any one of them."
But if his attachment for the girls of his acquaintance collectively
was not coupled with a quivering of his heart for any individual Mamie,
or Fanny, or Sarah, it did not, on the other hand, preclude a certain
lingering tenderness for his wife. But then his wife had long since
ceased to be what she had been of yore. From a reality she had
gradually become transmuted into a fancy. During the three years since
he had set foot on the soil, where a "shister[5] becomes a mister and a
mister a shister," he had lived so much more than three years--so much
more, in fact, than in all the twenty-two years of his previous
life--that his Russian past appeared to him a dream and his wife and
child, together with his former self, fellow-characters in a charming
tale, which he was neither willing to banish from his memory nor able
to reconcile with the actualities of his American present. The question
of how to effect this reconciliation, and of causing Gitl and little
Yosselé to step out of the thickening haze of reminiscence and to take
their stand by his side as living parts of his daily life, was a
fretful subject from the consideration of which he cowardly shrank. He
wished he could both import his family and continue his present mode of
life. At the bottom of his soul he wondered why this should not be
feasible. But he knew that it was not, and his heart would sink at the
notion of forfeiting the lion's share of attentions for which he came
in at the hands of those who lionized him. Moreover, how will he look
people in the face in view of the lie he has been acting? He longed for
an interminable respite. But as sooner or later the minds of his
acquaintances were bound to become disabused, and he would have to face
it all out anyway, he was many a time on the point of making a clean
breast of it, and failed to do so for a mere lack of nerve, each time
letting himself off on the plea that a week or two before his wife's
arrival would be a more auspicious occasion for the disclosure.
[5] Yiddish for shoemaker.
Neither Jake nor his wife nor his parents could write even Yiddish,
although both he and his old father read fluently the punctuated Hebrew
of the Old Testament or the Prayer-book. Their correspondence had
therefore to be carried on by proxy, and, as a consequence, at longer
intervals than would have been the case otherwise. The missives which
he received differed materially in length, style, and degree of
illiteracy as well as in point of penmanship; but they all agreed in
containing glowing encomiums of little Yosselé, exhorting Yekl not to
stray from the path of righteousness, and reproachfully asking whether
he ever meant to send the ticket. The latter point had an exasperating
effect on Jake. There were times, however, when it would touch his
heart and elicit from him his threadbare vow to send the ticket at
once. But then he never had money enough to redeem it. And, to tell the
truth, at the bottom of his heart he was at such moments rather glad of
his poverty. At all events, the man who wrote Jake's letters had a
standing order to reply in the sharpest terms at his command that Yekl
did not spend his money on drink; that America was not the land they
took it for, where one could "scoop gold by the skirtful;" that Gitl
need not fear lest he meant to desert her, and that as soon as he had
saved enough to pay her way and to set up a decent establishment she
would be sure to get the ticket.
Jake's scribe was an old Jew who kept a little stand on Pitt Street,
which is one of the thoroughfares and market places of the Galician
quarter of the Ghetto, and where Jake was unlikely to come upon any
people of his acquaintance. The old man scraped together his livelihood
by selling Yiddish newspapers and cigarettes, and writing letters for a
charge varying, according to the length of the epistle, from five to
ten cents. Each time Jake received a letter he would take it to the
Galician, who would first read it to him (for an extra remuneration of
one cent) and then proceed to pen five cents' worth of rhetoric, which
might have been printed and forwarded one copy at a time for all the
additions or alterations Jake ever caused to be made in it.
"What else shall I write?" the old man would ask his patron, after
having written and read aloud the first dozen lines, which Jake had
come to know by heart.
"How do _I_ know?" Jake would respond. "It is you who can write; so you
ought to understand what else to write."
And the scribe would go on to write what he had written on almost every
previous occasion. Jake would keep the letter in his pocket until he
had spare United States money enough to convert into ten rubles, and
then he would betake himself to the draft office and have the amount,
together with the well-crumpled epistle, forwarded to Povodye.
And so it went month in and month out.
The first letter which reached Jake after the scene at Joe Peltner's
dancing academy came so unusually close upon its predecessor that he
received it from his landlady's hand with a throb of misgiving. He had
always laboured under the presentiment that some unknown enemies--for
he had none that he could name--would some day discover his wife's
address and anonymously represent him to her as contemplating another
marriage, in order to bring Gitl down upon him unawares. His first
thought accordingly was that this letter was the outcome of such a
conspiracy. "Or maybe there is some death in the family?" he next
reflected, half with terror and half with a feeling almost amounting to
reassurance.
When the cigarette vender unfolded the letter he found it to be of such
unusual length that he stipulated an additional cent for the reading of
it.
"_Alla right_, hurry up now!" Jake said, grinding his teeth on a
mumbled English oath.
"_Righd evay! Righd evay!_" the old fellow returned jubilantly, as he
hastily adjusted his spectacles and addressed himself to his task.
The letter had evidently been penned by some one laying claim to Hebrew
scholarship and ambitious to impress the New World with it; for it was
quite replete with poetic digressions, strained and twisted to suit
some quotation from the Bible. And what with this unstinted verbosity,
which was Greek to Jake, one or two interruptions by the old man's
customers, and interpretations necessitated by difference of dialect, a
quarter of an hour had elapsed before the scribe realized the trend of
what he was reading.
Then he suddenly gave a start, as if shocked.
"Vot'sh a madder? Vot'sh a madder?"
"_Vot's der madder?_ What should be the _madder_? Wait--a--I don't know
what I can do"--he halted in perplexity.
"Any bad news?" Jake inquired, turning pale. "Speak out!"
"Speak out! It is all very well for you to say 'speak out.' You forget
that one is a piece of Jew," he faltered, hinting at the orthodox
custom which enjoins a child of Israel from being the messenger of sad
tidings.
"Don't _bodder_ a head!" Jake shouted savagely. "I have paid you,
haven't I?"
"_Say_, young man, you need not be so angry," the other said,
resentfully. "Half of the letter I have read, have I not? so I shall
refund you one cent and leave me in peace." He took to fumbling in his
pockets for the coin, with apparent reluctance.
"Tell me what is the matter," Jake entreated, with clinched fists. "Is
anybody dead? Do tell me now."
"_Vell_, since you know it already, I may as well tell you," said the
scribe cunningly, glad to retain the cent and Jake's patronage. "It is
your father who has been freed; may he have a bright paradise."
"Ha?" Jake asked aghast, with a wide gape.
The Galician resumed the reading in solemn, doleful accents. The
melancholy passage was followed by a jeremiade upon the penniless
condition of the family and Jake's duty to send the ticket without
further procrastination. As to his mother, she preferred the Povodye
graveyard to a watery sepulchre, and hoped that her beloved and only
son, the apple of her eye, whom she had been awake nights to bring up
to manhood, and so forth, would not forget her.
"So now they will be here for sure, and there can be no more delay!"
was Jake's first distinct thought. "Poor father!" he inwardly exclaimed
the next moment, with deep anguish. His native home came back to him
with a vividness which it had not had in his mind for a long time.
"Was he an old man?" the scribe queried sympathetically.
"About seventy," Jake answered, bursting into tears.
"Seventy? Then he had lived to a good old age. May no one depart
younger," the old man observed, by way of "consoling the bereaved."
As Jake's tears instantly ran dry he fell to wringing his hands and
moaning.
"Good-night!" he presently said, taking leave. "I'll see you to-morrow,
if God be pleased."
"Good-night!" the scribe returned with heartfelt condolence.
As he was directing his steps to his lodgings Jake wondered why he did
not weep. He felt that this was the proper thing for a man in his
situation to do, and he endeavoured to inspire himself with emotions
befitting the occasion. But his thoughts teasingly gambolled about
among the people and things of the street. By-and-bye, however, he
became sensible of his mental eye being fixed upon the big fleshy mole
on his father's scantily bearded face. He recalled the old man's
carriage, the melancholy nod of his head, his deep sigh upon taking
snuff from the time-honoured birch bark which Jake had known as long as
himself; and his heart writhed with pity and with the acutest pangs of
homesickness. "And it was evening and it was morning, the sixth day.
And the heavens and the earth were finished." As the Hebrew words of
the Sanctification of the Sabbath resounded in Jake's ears, in his
father's senile treble, he could see his gaunt figure swaying over a
pair of Sabbath loaves. It is Friday night. The little room, made tidy
for the day of rest and faintly illuminated by the mysterious light of
two tallow candles rising from freshly burnished candlesticks, is
pervaded by a benign, reposeful warmth and a general air of peace and
solemnity. There, seated by the side of the head of the little family
and within easy reach of the huge brick oven, is his old mother,
flushed with fatigue, and with an effort keeping her drowsy eyes open
to attend, with a devout mien, her husband's prayer. Opposite to her,
by the window, is Yekl, the present Jake, awaiting his turn to chant
the same words in the holy tongue, and impatiently thinking of the
repast to come after it. Besides the three of them there is no one else
in the chamber, for Jake visioned the fascinating scene as he had known
it for almost twenty years, and not as it had appeared during the short
period since the family had been joined by Gitl and subsequently by
Yosselé.
Suddenly he felt himself a child, the only and pampered son of a doting
mother. He was overcome with a heart-wringing consciousness of being an
orphan, and his soul was filled with a keen sense of desolation and
self-pity. And thereupon everything around him--the rows of gigantic
tenement houses, the hum and buzz of the scurrying pedestrians, the
jingling horse cars--all suddenly grew alien and incomprehensible to
Jake. Ah, if he could return to his old home and old days, and have his
father recite Sanctification again, and sit by his side, opposite to
mother, and receive from her hand a plate of reeking _tzimess_,[6] as
of yore! Poor mother! He _will_ not forget her--But what is the Italian
playing on that organ, anyhow? Ah, it is the new waltz! By the way,
this is Monday and they are dancing at Joe's now and he is not there.
"I shall not go there to-night, nor any other night," he commiserated
himself, his reveries for the first time since he had left the Pitt
Street cigarette stand passing to his wife and child. Her image now
stood out in high relief with the multitudinous noisy scene at Joe's
academy for a discordant, disquieting background, amid which there
vaguely defined itself the reproachful saintlike visage of the
deceased. "I will begin a new life!" he vowed to himself.
[6] A kind of dessert made of carrots or turnips.
He strove to remember the child's features, but could only muster the
faintest recollection--scarcely anything beyond a general symbol--a red
little thing smiling, as he, Jake, tickles it under its tiny chin. Yet
Jake's finger at this moment seemed to feel the soft touch of that
little chin, and it sent through him a thrill of fatherly affection to
which he had long been a stranger. Gitl, on the other hand, loomed up
in all the individual sweetness of her rustic face. He beheld her
kindly mouth opening wide--rather too wide, but all the lovelier for
it--as she spoke; her prominent red gums, her little black eyes. He
could distinctly hear her voice with her peculiar lisp, as one summer
morning she had burst into the house and, clapping her hands in
despair, she had cried, "A weeping to me! The yellow rooster is gone!"
or, as coming into the smithy she would say: "Father-in-law,
mother-in-law calls you to dinner. Hurry up, Yekl, dinner is ready."
And although this was all he could recall her saying, Jake thought
himself retentive of every word she had ever uttered in his presence.
His heart went out to Gitl and her environment, and he was seized with
a yearning tenderness that made him feel like crying. "I would not
exchange her little finger for all the American _ladas_," he
soliloquized, comparing Gitl in his mind with the dancing-school girls
of his circle. It now filled him with disgust to think of the morals of
some of them, although it was from his own sinful experience that he
knew them to be of a rather loose character.
He reached his lodgings in a devout mood, and before going to bed he
was about to say his prayers. Not having said them for nearly three
years, however, he found, to his dismay, that he could no longer do it
by heart. His landlady had a prayer-book, but, unfortunately, she kept
it locked in the bureau, and she was now asleep, as was everybody else
in the house. Jake reluctantly undressed and went to bed on the kitchen
lounge, where he usually slept.
When a boy his mother had taught him to believe that to go to sleep at
night without having recited the bed prayer rendered one liable to be
visited and choked in bed by some ghost. Later, when he had grown up,
and yet before he had left his birthplace, he had come to set down this
earnest belief of his good old mother as a piece of womanish
superstition, while since he had settled in America he had hardly ever
had an occasion to so much as think of bed prayers. Nevertheless, as he
now lay vaguely listening to the weird ticking of the clock on the
mantelpiece over the stove, and at the same time desultorily brooding
upon his father's death, the old belief suddenly uprose in his mind and
filled him with mortal terror. He tried to persuade himself that it was
a silly notion worthy of womenfolk, and even affected to laugh at it
audibly. But all in vain. "Cho-king! Cho-king! Cho-king!" went the
clock, and the form of a man in white burial clothes never ceased
gleaming in his face. He resolutely turned to the wall, and, pulling
the blanket over his head, he huddled himself snugly up for
instantaneous sleep. But presently he felt the cold grip of a pair of
hands about his throat, and he even mentally stuck out his tongue, as
one does while being strangled.
With a fast-beating heart Jake finally jumped off the lounge, and
gently knocked at the door of his landlady's bedroom.
"_Eshcoosh me, mishesh_, be so kind as to lend me your prayer-book. I
want to say the night prayer," he addressed her imploringly.
The old woman took it for a cruel practical joke, and flew into a
passion.
"Are you crazy or drunk? A nice time to make fun!"
And it was not until he had said with suppliant vehemence, "May I as
surely be alive as my father is dead!" and she had subjected him to a
cross-examination, that she expressed sympathy and went to produce the
keys.