"Oh, papa!" sobbed Flora; "will you ever put an end to it? You know
I'll never marry him."
"Do I compel you to?" he replied. "What do you care if he is in the
house? He does not take away your dinner, does he? Imagine that he is
your brother and don't bother your head about him. The boy has become
so dear to me that I feel as if he were my own son. Will _you_ recite
Kaddish for my soul? Will you play for me at the anniversary of my
death? God thought I was not good enough to have a son, but he sent me
this holy child to take the place of one. As I hear him read his holy
books," he went on, with mounting pathos, "it melts like ice-cream in
my heart. It pleased the Uppermost to make a boor of your papa. Well,
I suppose He knows his business, and I am not going to poke my nose
in, and ask questions; but He seems to have taken pity on me after
all, and in my old age he has sent me an angel, so that I may get the
credit of supporting him. Did you hear what the wise men said? That to
support a man who does nothing but study sacred books is as good as
offering sacrifices. Yes, my daughter, God has put this boy in my
hands; He sent me all the way to Pravly for him--all to give me a
chance to make up for my sins. Do you want me to kick him out? Not if
New York turned upside down."
"But, father"--
"Hold on! Let me talk the heart out of myself. It's no use asking me
to send him away. He is God's gift. He is as holy as a Purity (the
scrolls of the Law). You are my daughter, and he is my son. I don't
chase you under the bridal canopy with a strap, do I? If God does not
wish the match, it won't come off, that's all."
The conversation took place about a fortnight after the great debate.
Asriel lived in the hope that when Shaya had learned some English and
the ways of Flora's circle, she would get to like him. He could not
see how it was possible to withstand the charms of the young man whom
he sincerely thought the handsomest fellow in the Jewish colony. He
provided him with a teacher, and trusted the rest to time and God.
"Just fix him up in English and a little figuring, and that's all," he
instructed the teacher. "But mind you, don't take him too far into
those Gentile books of yours. He does not want any of the monkey
tricks they teach the children at college. Do you understand?"
Flora was getting used to Shaya's presence in the house, as if he
actually were a newly discovered brother of hers, brought up in a
queer way which she could not understand, and it was only occasionally
and at growing intervals that the situation would burst upon her, and
she would plead with her father as she had done.
The two young people frequently found themselves alone. The door
between the front parlor, which was now Shaya's study, and Flora's
boudoir was most of the time open. They often talked together, and she
quizzed him about his manners, and once or twice even went over his
English lessons with him, laughing at his mispronunciations, and
correcting them in the imposing manner of her former school-teachers.
"Why do you work your fingers like that?" she once said, with a pained
look. "Can't you try and read without them?"
"I am used to it from the Talmud-he-he-he!" he tittered, as if
acknowledging a compliment.
Her piano did not disturb him in his studies, for in the synagogues,
where he had grown up, he had been used to read in a turmoil of other
voices; but he loved the instrument, and he would often pause to
listen to Flora's energetic strokes through the door. When the tune
was a melancholy one its first accords would make him start, with a
thrill; and as he proceeded to listen his heart would contract with a
sharp feeling of homesickness, and at the same time he would be
longing for still more familiarity in the performer's manner toward
him. Sometimes he would cross over to her room and quietly stand
behind her while she was playing.
"Ah, it is so nice!" he once said, feeling himself in a paradise on
earth.
"What are you doing here?" she exclaimed, facing about toward him, in
affected surprise. "Music ain't for a 'holy child' like yourself." She
mocked a favorite expression of her father's.
"Don't say that," he reproached her. "You always like to tease me. Why
don't I tease you?"
Upon the whole, Shaya took the situation quite recklessly. He studied
his Talmud and his English, let Tamara cloy him with all sorts of
tidbits, and roamed about the streets and public buildings. In less
than six months he knew the city and its suburbs much better than
Flora, and could tell the meaning of thousands of printed English
words, although he neither knew how to use them himself nor recognized
them in the speech of others. Flora was amazed by his rapid progress,
and the facility with which he mastered his Arithmetic and English
Grammar--in neither of which she had been strong at school--even
piqued her ambition. It was as if she had been beaten by the "holy
soul" on her own ground.
The novelty of studying things so utterly out of his rut was like a
newly discovered delicacy to his mental palate. He knew by heart a
considerable part of the English translation in his Hebrew prayer-book
and Old Testament, and his greatest pleasure, when Asriel was not
about, was to do arithmetical problems. But the problems were all
child's play to him, and he craved some higher grade of intellectual
food in the same Gentile line. This he knew from his Talmud to be
contained in the "Wisdom of Measuring," which he had learned of his
teacher to call Geometry.
"Bring me a Geometry, please," he whispered to his instructor.
"I will, but don't say a word to Mr. Stroon about it."
The forbidden fruit was furnished, and the prodigy of sacred lore
applied himself to it with voracity.
"How cunning!" he said to the teacher, in a transport of enthusiasm.
"Of course, it is not as deep as Talmud, but I never dreamed there
were such subtle things in the Gentile books at all--may I be ill if I
did."
"This is only the beginning of it," the other returned, in whispered
exultation. "Wait till you get deeper into it. And then there are
other books, far more interesting."
"Say, young fellow!" Asriel said to Shaya's teacher a week or so
later; "you need not trouble your righteous legs to bring you here any
more. You are getting too thick with the boy."
Shaya now found no difficulty in plodding through the theorems and
problems unaided. But he yearned after his teacher and friend, and for
several days could relish neither his Talmud nor his contraband
Geometry. He grew restless. His soul was languishing with thirst.
"Guess where I have been," he confidentially said to Flora, coming
from the street one afternoon. He spoke in Yiddish, and she answered
in English, interspersed with the same dialect.
"Not in the synagogue, studying?" she queried.
"No--at the Astor Library," he whispered. "They have such a lot of
books there, Flora! Upstairs and downstairs--large rooms like rich
synagogues, with shelves all over the walls, and all full of books.
Have you ever been there, Flora?"
"N-no!" she owned, with reluctance. The "holy soul" was clearly
forging ahead of her in a world which she considered all her own; and
she hated the idea of it, and liked it at the same time. "What did you
there?"
"I just looked at the books--oh, what a lot!--and then I found out how
to get a Geometry,--they have everything in the world, I tell
you,--and I did some problems. Don't tell your father I was there."
"Of course I won't," she said intimately. "Can ladies come in?"
"Certainly; they have a separate place for them, though; will you go
there with me?"
"Some day," she rejoined evasively.
"Will you? Oh, it's so nice to be sitting and reading there! Only you
must sit still. I forgot myself, and as I was figuring out some nice
point, I began to reason aloud, so a fine old gentleman stepped up to
my side and touched me on the shoulder. Oh, I got so scared, Flora!
But he did not do me anything--may I be ill if he did. He only told me
to be quiet."
Flora burst out laughing.
"I'll bet you, you was singing in that funny way you have when you are
studying the Talmud."
"Yes," he admitted joyfully.
"And working your hands and shaking the life out of yourself," she
pursued, mimicking his gestures.
"No, I was not--may I not live till to-morrow if I was," he protested
vehemently, with a touch of resentment. "Oh, it is so nice to be
there! I never knew there were so many Gentile books in the world at
all. I wonder what they are all about. Only I am so troubled about my
English." He interrupted himself, with a distressed air. "When I
asked them for the book, and how to get it, they could not understand
me."
"_I_ can understand everything you say when you speak English. You're
all right," she comforted him. His troubled, childlike smile and his
shining clear blue eyes, as he spoke, went to her heart.
"_You_ can, but other people can't. I so wish I could speak it like
you, Flora. Do read a page or two with me, will you? I'll get my
Reader--shall I?"
"What's your hurry? Can't you wait?"
He could not wait. He was in a fever of impatience to inhale the whole
of the Gentile language--definitions, spelling, pronunciation, and
all--with one desperate effort. It was the one great impediment that
seemed to stand between him and the enchanted new world that had
revealed itself to him.
"Oh, do hear me read--may you live long, Flora! It somehow draws mo as
with a kind of impure force. Will you?"
"All right," she yielded, with kindly curiosity at the fervor of his
request, and feeling flattered.
He had been reading perhaps a quarter of an hour when he grew
absent-minded.
"You must have skipped a line again," she said, in an awkward
undertone.
"Oh, yes!"
They were seated at a respectful distance, with the corner of the
marble table between them, her full, well-modeled bust erect and
stately against the pier-glass. She wore a waist of dark-blue silk,
trimmed with red, and there was a red ribbon in her shock of inky
hair. Presently she leaned forward to see a mispronounced word for
herself. Their heads found themselves close together. Her ivory cheek
almost touched his.
"Where is it?" she questioned, under her breath.
He made no reply. His glance was riveted to her raven eyelashes. A
dash of scarlet lurking under her chin dazed his brain. After a slight
pause he said, as he timidly stroked her burning cheek:--
"It is so smooth!"
She had an impulse to withdraw her face, but felt benumbed. He went on
patting her, until, meeting with no resistance, his lips touched her
cheek, in a gingerly kiss. Both lowered their eyes. They were silent,
but their hearts, each conscious of the other's beatings, throbbed
wildly.
"Bad boy!" she then whispered, without raising her head.
After another silence, as their eyes met, they burst into a subdued,
nervous titter.
"You must not do that again," she said. "Is this the kind of pious man
you are?"
"Don't say that, Flora--pray don't. You know it hurts my feelings when
you speak like that," he implored her. And impelled by the
embarrassed, affectionate sadness of her mien, he seized her hand and
fell to kissing first her fingers and then her eyes, as though
beseeching them to reveal the meaning of their sombre look. Their lips
met and clung together in a trance of passion. When they parted Shaya
felt ten years older, and as his eye fell upon the bookcase, he
wondered what those glittering, massive tomes were doing there.
"Will you tell your father that you want to be my sweetheart?" he
asked after a while.
His voice and his features appeared to her in a novel aspect.
"How do you know I do?" she said, with playful defiance, hiding a
burst of admiration which was lost upon the unworldly young man.
"Why--don't you?" he demanded solicitously.