I
Flora was alone in the back parlor, which she had appropriated for a
sort of boudoir. She sat in her rocker, in front of the parlor stove,
absorbed in "Little Dorrit." Her well-groomed girlish form was
enveloped in a kindly warmth whose tender embrace tinged her interest
in the narrative with a triumphant consciousness of the snowstorm
outside.
Little by little the rigid afternoon light began to fade into a
melancholy gray. Dusk was creeping into the room in almost visible
waves. Flora let the book rest on her lap and fixed her gaze on the
twinkling scarlet of the stove-glass. The thickening twilight, the
warmth of the apartment, and the atmosphere of the novel blended
together, and for some moments Flora felt far away from herself.
She was the only girl of her circle who would read Dickens, Scott, or
Thackeray in addition to the "Family Story Paper" and the "Fireside
Companion," which were the exclusive literary purveyors to her former
classmates at the Chrystie Street Grammar School. There were a piano
and a neat little library in her room.
She was rather tall and well formed. Her oblong ivory face,
accentuated by a mass of unruly hair of a lustreless black, was never
deserted by a faint glimmer of a smile, at once pensive and arch. When
she broke into one of her hearty, good-natured laughs, her deep, dark,
appealing eyes would seem filled with grief. Her nose, a trifle too
precipitous, gave an unexpected tone to the extreme picturesqueness of
the whole effect, and, when she walked, partook of the dignity of her
gait.
A month or two before we make Flora's acquaintance she had celebrated
her twentieth birthday, having been born in this little private house
on Mott Street, which was her father's property.
A matchmaker had recently called, and he had launched into a eulogy of
a young Jewish physician; but old Stroon had cut him short, in his
blunt way: his only child was to marry a God-fearing business man, and
no fellow deep in Gentile lore and shaving his beard need apply. As
to Flora, she was burning to be a doctor's wife. A rising young
merchant, a few years in the country, was the staple matrimonial
commodity in her set. Most of her married girl friends, American-born
themselves, like Flora, had husbands of this class--queer fellows,
whose broken English had kept their own sweethearts chuckling. Flora
hated the notion of marrying as the other Mott or Bayard Street girls
did. She was accustomed to use her surroundings for a background,
throwing her own personality into high relief. But apart from this,
she craved a more refined atmosphere than her own, and the vague ideal
she had was an educated American gentleman, like those who lived
up-town.
Accordingly, when the word "doctor" had left the matchmaker's lips,
she seized upon it as a great discovery. In those days--the early
eighties--a match of this kind was an uncommon occurrence in the New
York Ghetto.
Flora pictured a clean-shaven, high-hatted, spectacled gentleman
jumping out of a buggy, and the image became a fixture in her mind. "I
won't marry anybody except a doctor," she would declare, with
conscious avoidance of bad grammar, as it behooved a doctor's wife.
But what was to be done with father's opposition? Asriel Stroon had
never been the man to yield, and now that he grew more devout every
day, her case seemed hopeless. But then Flora was her father's
daughter, and when she took a resolve she could not imagine herself
otherwise than carrying it out, sooner or later.
Flora's thoughts were flowing in this direction when her father's
gruff voice made itself heard from the dining-room below. It was the
anniversary of his father's death. In former years he would have
contented himself with obit services, at the synagogue; this time,
however, he had passed the day in fasting and chanting psalms at home,
in addition to lighting his own candle in front of the cantor's desk
and reciting _Kaddish_ for the departed soul, at the house of prayer.
It touched Flora's heart to think of him fasting and praying all day,
and, with her book in her hand, she ran down to meet him.
"Just comin' from the synagogue, papa?" she greeted him
affectionately, in English. "This settles your fast, don't it?"
"It is not so easy to settle with Him, my daughter," he returned, in
Yiddish, pointing to the ceiling. "You can never be through serving
the Uppermost. Hurry up, Tamara!" he added, in the direction of the
adjoining kitchen.
"You ain' goin' to say more Thilim[1] to-night, are you, pa?"
[1] Psalms.
"Why, does it cost you too much?" he snarled good humoredly.
"Yes it does--your health. I won't let you sing again. You are weak
and you got enough."
"Hush! It is not potato-soup; you can never have enough of it." He
fell to tugging nervously at his white beard, which grew in a pair of
tiny imperials. "Tamara! It's time to break the fast, isn't it?"
"You can wash your hands. Supper is ready," came the housekeeper's
pleasant voice.
He took off his brown derby, and covered his steel-gray hair with a
velvet skull-cap; and as he carried his robust, middle-sized body into
the kitchen, to perform his ablutions, his ruddy, gnarled face took on
an air of piety.
When supper was over and Asriel and Tamara were about to say grace,
Flora resumed the reading of her novel.
"Off with that lump of Gentile nastiness while holy words are being
said!" the old man growled.
Flora obeyed, in amazement. Only a few months before she had seldom
seen him intone grace at all. She was getting used to his new habits,
but such rigor as he now displayed was unintelligible to her, and she
thought it unbearable.
"You can read your book a little after. The wisdom of it will not run
away," chimed in Tamara, with good-natured irony. She was a poor widow
of forty. Asriel had engaged her for her piety and for the rabbinical
learning of her late husband, as much as for her culinary fame in the
Ghetto.
Asriel intoned grace in indistinct droning accents. By degrees,
however, as he warmed up to the Hebrew prayer, whose words were a
conglomeration of incomprehensible sounds to him, he fell to swaying
to and fro, and his voice broke into an exalted, heartrending
sing-song, Tamara accompanying him in whispers, and dolefully nodding
her bewigged head all the while.
Flora was moved. The scene was novel to her, and she looked on with
the sympathetic reverence of a Christian visiting a Jewish synagogue
on the Day of Atonement.
At last the fervent tones died away in a solemn murmur. Silence fell
over the cosy little room. Asriel sat tugging at his scanty beard as
if in an effort to draw it into a more venerable growth.
"Flora!" he presently growled. "I am going to Europe."
When Asriel Stroon thought he spoke, and when he spoke he acted.
"Goin' to Europe! Are you crazy, papa? What are you talkin' about?"
"Just what you hear. After Passover I am going to Europe. I must take
a look at Pravly."
"But you ain't been there over thirty-five years. You don't remember
not'in' at all."
"I don't remember Pravly? Better than Mott Street; better than my
nose. I was born there, my daughter," he added, as he drew closer to
her and began to stroke her glossless black hair. This he did so
seldom that the girl felt her heart swelling in her throat. She was
yearning after him in advance.
Tamara stared in beaming amazement at the grandeur of the enterprise.
"Are you really going?" she queried, with a touch of envy.
"What will you do there?--It's so far away!" Flora resumed, for want
of a weightier argument at hand.
"Never mind, my child; I won't have to walk all the way."
"But the Russian police will arrest you for stayin' away so long.
Didn't you say they would?"
"The kernel of a hollow nut!" he replied, extemporizing an equivalent
of "Fiddlesticks!" Flora was used to his metaphors, although they were
at times rather vague, and set one wondering how they came into his
head at all. "The kernel of a hollow nut! Show a _treif_[2] gendarme a
_kosher_[3] coin, and he will be shivering with ague. Long live the
American dollar!"
[2] Food not prepared according to the laws of Moses; impure.
[3] The opposite of _treif_.