IX

"Is Shayaly in?" inquired old Asriel on entering Flora's room one

morning in midsummer. It was four months after his daughter's

betrothment to the Talmudist had been celebrated by a solemn ceremony

and a sumptuous feast, the wedding having been set for a later date.

The crowning glory of his achievement Stroon postponed, like a rare

bottle of wine, for some future day. He dreaded to indulge himself in

such a rapid succession of This World joys lest he might draw upon his

Share in the World-to-come. Will the Uppermost let him live to see his

daughter and the "holy child," standing side by side under the Canopy?

Asriel was now confident that He would. "Is Shayaly in?"

"Of course he is--papa," Flora answered, raising her face from her

book. Her "papa" was added aloud, and as if upon after-thought.

The parlor door stood ajar. Asriel stationed himself near by and

listened to the young man's habitual sing-song. The old man's face

gradually became radiant with bliss.

"My crown, my Messiah, my Kaddish! My Share in the World-to-come!" he

muttered.

"Did you have breakfast, papa?" Flora demanded, speaking still louder

than before.

At this moment Shaya's sing-song broke out with fresh enthusiasm and

his Hebrew words became distinct. Asriel waved her away fiercely.

After a little he remarked in a subdued voice, as he pointed to the

front parlor,--

"_This_ is my breakfast. This is for the soul, my child; the worms of

the grave cannot touch it, and you take it along to the other world.

Everything else is a lot of rubbish."

He made to leave, but could not help pausing, in fresh admiration, and

then, softly opening the parlor door he entered the sanctum, on

tiptoe, in order to feast his eye as well as his ear on the thrilling

scene. He found Shaya rapturously swaying and singing over a Talmud

volume. Flora watched her father with roguish delight.

"I am afraid I must not be gloating over him like this," Asriel

rebuked himself in his heart. "I may give him the evil eye." When he

regained the back parlor he said, under his breath: "Floraly, I am

afraid your company may disturb him sometimes. A pretty sweetheart is

apt to stir a fellow's brains, you know, and take him away from the

Law. He had better study more at the synagogues."

The girl blushed to her charcoal hair and dropped her glance. But her

father had scarcely gained his room, on the floor above, when she flew

into the front parlor with a ringing giggle.

"Now you can go right on, dearie," she said, encircling Shaya's neck

with one arm, and producing with the other an English textbook on

Natural Philosophy, which had lain open under the huge Hebrew volume.

"You heard me holler, didn't you?"

"Of course I did," Shaya answered beamingly. "He interrupted me in the

middle of such a cunning explanation!"

"Did he? What was it about? All about sounds--the same as before?"

"Yes, but it is even more brainy than what I told you."

He proceeded to expound, in Yiddish, what he had been reading on

Acoustics, she listening to his enthusiastic popularization with

docile, loving inattention.

* * * * *

The young man made a pretense of spending his afternoons, and

sometimes also mornings, at the various synagogues of the Jewish

quarter. His proud guardian encouraged this habit, in order that his

"daughter's bridegroom" might disseminate his sacred knowledge among

other congregations than his own. "Your learning is the gift of God,

Shayaly," he would say, "and you needn't be ashamed to peddle it

around. Reb Lippe said America wanted a man like you to spread the

holy Law here. Go and do it, my son, and the Uppermost will help us

all for your sake."

The prodigy and his importer were the talk of the orthodox colony, and

nothing was more pleasing to Asriel than to hear the praises of his

daughter's fiancé sounded by the Talmudists. There came a time,

however, when, in his own synagogue, at least, these encomiums ceased.

Asriel missed them keenly and pestered the learned men of the

congregation with incessant talks about Shaya, for the purpose of

worrying out some acknowledgment of his phenomenal talents. But the

concession was mostly made in a half-hearted way, and poor Asriel

would be left hungrier than ever. Particularly was his heart longing

for the warm eulogies of Reb Tzalel, a poor, sickly old peddler, who

was considered one of the most pious and learned men in the

neighborhood. Asriel liked the man for his nervous sincerity and

uncompromising self-respect. He often asked him to his house, but the

tattered, underfed peddler invariably declined the invitation.

"What will I do there, Reb Asriel?" he would say, with the pained sort

of smile which would light up his ghastly old face whenever he spoke.

"Look at your costly carpet and furniture, and bear in mind that you

are a landlord and I a poor peddler! At the synagogue I like you

better, for here we are equals. Saith the verse in the Book of Job:

'Whereas He is one that shows no favor to chieftains, and

distinguishes not the rich before the indigent, for all of them are

the work of his hands.'" Reb Tzalel translated the verse into Yiddish

for the benefit of his listener, whereupon Asriel felt a much

wealthier man than he was, and at the same time he had a sense of

humiliation, as though his money were something to be ashamed of.

This man's unusual reticence on the point of Shaya's merits chagrined

Asriel sorely, and his mind even began to be troubled by some vague

misgivings on that score.

One evening Asriel sat by Reb Tzalel's side in the study rooms of his

synagogue. It was in the latter part of November, and Shaya's wedding

was to take place during the Feast of Hanuccah, some few weeks later.

The evening services, which on week days were held in these rooms,

were over, and the "learners" could now give themselves to their

divine studies undisturbed, save for the possible and unwelcome advent

of some belated Ten Worshipers. The two spacious, dingy rooms, their

connecting doors wide open, were dimly lighted with candles placed

upon the plain long deal tables ranged against their discolored walls.

The open bookcases were filled with dilapidated old volumes, many more

being in use or strewn about, in chaotic heaps, on the tables,

benches, or window-sills.

In one room, around one of the long tables, were gathered the members

of the daily Mishnah class. There were about a dozen of them, mostly

poor peddlers or artisans,--a humble, seedy, pitiable lot, come after

a hard day's work or freezing, to "take a holy word into their

mouths." Hardly one of these was up to the Gemarah part of the Talmud,

and even the Mishnah only few could brave single-handed. They sat at

their open books following their voluntary teacher, a large, heavy,

middle-aged man,--a mass of unkempt beard, flesh, and rags, ablaze

with the intellectual fury of his enormous black eyes. He was reading

aloud, with ferocious appetite, swaying and jerking his disheveled

bulk, as he ever and anon tossed up his head to interpret the Mishna

to his pupils, and every little while breaking off in the middle of a

sentence, or even a word, to let his class shout the other half as a

guaranty of proficiency. Some of his listeners plodded along the lines

of their books, in humble silence, with their index fingers for

fescues; the brighter ones boldly interrupted the ponderous man,

joyously anticipating his explanations or pointing out some

discrepancy; one old dissembler repeated unintelligible

half-sentences with well-acted gusto; another little old fellow

betrayed the fog in his mind by timid nods of assent, while still

another was bravely kept from dozing off on his holy book by frequent

neighborly nudges from the man next him. Standing behind the members

of the class were some envying "boors," like our poor Asriel, to whom

even the Mishnah was a luxury beyond their intellectual means.

One of the long tables in the adjoining room was covered with the open

folios of the daily Gemarah class,--some fifteen men of all ages and

economical conditions from the doddering apple-vender, to whom the

holy books are the only source of pleasure in this life as well as in

the other, to the well-fed, overdressed young furniture-dealer, with

whom the Talmud is a second nature, contracted in the darker days of

his existence in Russia. There were several "keen brains" in the

group, and a former "prodigy" or two, like Shaya. The class needed no

guide, but one old man with a boyish face framed in snow-white hair,

and wearing a sea of unstarched linen collar about his emaciated neck,

was their chosen reader. He also left many sentences unuttered, but

he did it merely because he thought them too well-known to need

repetition. Whenever he had something to add to the text, he would

address himself to the man by his side, snapping his fingers at him

genially, and at times all but pinching him for ecstasy. The others

participated now by a twirl of a finger, now by the swift repetition

of a whole syllogism, now by an indescribable system of gestures,

enacting, in dumb show, the whole logical process involved in a nice

point. All at once the whole class would burst into a bedlam of voices

and gesticulations. When the whirlwind of enthusiasm subsided, it

might be followed by a bit of pleasantry,--from the exuberance of good

spirits at having got the better of a difficult point,--and, upon the

whole the motley company looked like a happy family at the Sabbath

table.

The other long tables in both rooms were occupied by _lomdim_ (learned

men), each intent upon the good deed of studying "for study's sake" by

himself: some humming to their musty folios melodiously; others

smiling and murmuring to them, like a fond mother to her babe; still

others wailing or grumbling or expostulating with their books, or

slapping them and yelling for delight, or roaring like a lion in a

cage. A patriarch teaching his ten-year-old grandson and both shouting

at the top of their voices, in an entanglement of pantomime; a swarthy

little grammar-school boy going it on his own hook over a volume

bigger than himself; a "fine householder" in reduced circumstances

dignifiedly swinging his form and twirling his sidelock as if he were

confiding a secret to his immense golden beard; one or two of the

hollow-voiced _prooshim_, who had come to America in search of

fortune, but who were now supported by the congregation for giving all

their time to "the law and the service;" a knot of men engaged in a

mixed discussion of "words of law" and "words of every-day life"--all

these voices and murmurs mingled in one effervescence of the sublime

and the ridiculous, with tragedy for a keynote,--twenty centuries

thrown pell-mell in a chaos of sound and motion.

Asriel could have lived on the spectacle, and although unable to

participate in it himself, he now, since the advent of the prodigy,

looked upon it as a world in which he was not without a voice. He was

seated in a remote corner of the Gemarah room, now watching the noisy

scenes with open-mouthed reverence, now turning to admire Reb Tzalel

by his side. The cadaverous face and burning eyes of the peddler were

sneering at the drab-colored page before him; while his voice sounded

melancholy, like a subdued bugle call.

Presently Reb Tzalel paused, and the two engaged in converse. As

Asriel was boasting of Shaya's genius and kindliness of disposition,

vainly courting his friend for a word of assent, the peddler, suddenly

reddening in the face, interrupted him:--

"What's the use of playing cat and rat, Mr. Stroon?" he burst out with

his ghastly smile. "I may as well tell you what lies like a heavy

stone on my heart. Your Shaya is going to the bad. He is an

_appikoros_."[9]

[9] Epicurean; atheist.

"An appikoros!" Asriel demanded, as if the word had suddenly acquired

a new meaning.

"Yes, an appikoros, and a Jeroboam the son of Nebat--he sins, and

leads others to sin," the Talmudist declared tartly. "I hated to

cause you the pain, Mr. Stroon, but he has gone too far in Gentile

books, and when he is here and you are not about he talks to everybody

he can get hold of concerning the way the world swings around the sun,

how rain and thunder, day and night--everything--can be explained as a

matter of common sense, and that there is no God in heaven, and all

that sort of vile stuff that you hear from every appikoros--may they

all be hurled from one end of the world to the other! Everything can

be explained--may the Angel of Death explain it to them, may they"--

"Hold on, Reb Tzalel!" Asriel shouted:

"You need not curse him: you don't feed him, do you? And what you say

is a lie!--as big a lie as Og the King of Bashan!" he concluded with

calm ferocity, raising his burly figure from the bench.

"A lie, is it? Very well, then--you shall know all. Little Mendele saw

your imported decoration smoking a cigarette last Sabbath."

"Shaya smoke on the Sabbath!" Asriel echoed. The practical, concrete

nature of this sin came home to him with a more forceful blow than all

the peddler had said about Shaya's ungodly theories. "Begone!" the

surrounding chaos seemed to say to the "boor." "From now on you have

nothing to do here!"

"Shaya smoke a cigarette on the Sabbath!" he repeated. "Well, and I

have this to say, that Mendele, and yourself, and the whole lot of you

are nothing but a set of first-class liars and begrudging

gossip-mongers. It must give him a belly-ache to think that he could

not afford such a bridegroom for his girl and that I could. Well, I

have got a prodigy for my daughter and he has licked the whole lot of

you learned fellows to ground coffee. I have got him,--see?--and let

all my enemies and the boy's enemies burst for envy." He clicked his

tongue and snapped his fingers, and for a moment stood glaring

witheringly at his interlocutor.

"Well, I am not going to argue with a boor," said Reb Tzalel, in utter

disgust.

His words were drowned in the noise, but the "boor" reached Asriel's

ear and touched him on the raw. "Shut up, Reb Tzalel!" he said,

paling.

"Why should I? This is not your house. It is God's dwelling. Here I

am richer than you. I only wanted to say that it is not you I pity.

You have been a boor, and that's what you are and will be. But the boy

was about to become a great man in Israel, and you have brought him

over here for bedeviled America to turn him into an appikoros. Woe!

woe! woe!"

"Keep still, Reb Tzalel; take pity," Asriel implored, in a squeaking

voice. "Don't spill any salt over my wounds. Forgive me,--you know I

am a boor. Do take pity and say no more; but all you have said--they

have said--is a lie--the cholera choke me if it is not." And gasping

for breath, he ran out of the synagogue.

When he found himself in the street he was conscious of some terrific

blow having just been dealt him, but did not clearly realize its full

meaning; and what had transpired a minute before, between him and Reb

Tzalel, seemed to have occurred in the remote past. The clamor of the

street peddlers, and the whole maze of squalor and noise through which

he was now scurrying, he appeared to hear and to view at a great

distance, as if it all were on the other side of a broad river, he

hurrying on his lonely way along the deserted bank opposite.

"An appikoros! an appikoros!" he said to himself, vainly trying to

grasp the meaning of the word which he knew but too well. "An

appikoros, smoking on the Sabbath!" The spectacle smote him in cold

blood. "Shaya smoke on the holy Sabbath! It's a lie!"

He started in the direction of Mendele's residence, bent upon

thrashing the red-haired talebearer to death. Soon, however, he halted

and turned homeward. The courage failed Asriel Stroon to face the man

who had seen his daughter's fiancé smoke a cigarette on a Saturday.

Then Shaya appeared to his mind as something polluted, sacrilegious,

and although this something had nothing in common with his beloved

prodigy, save the name, and the young man whitened in the distance,

pure and lovely as ever, Asriel's rage surged in the direction of his

home, and he mended pace to storm the house as soon as he could get

there.

When he collected his wits he decided to wait till he found out

everything for himself. For the first time, perhaps, he felt himself a

coward. He quailed before the thought that what he had heard from the

learned peddler might prove true, and he cringingly begged his own

mind to put off the culminating agony of believing it.

Nevertheless, when he saw Shaya, at the supper-table, his heart

whispered to him, in dismay: "An appikoros!" and the unuttered word

enveloped the prodigy in a forbidding, sinister atmosphere.

He now hated Shaya; he felt as though he feared him.

"Where have you been so late, papa?" Flora inquired.

"Deep in the earth. You care much where your papa is, do you?" he

snarled.

"Papa!" she said deprecatingly; "are you mad?"

He made no response.

"Have you been to the Mariv service?" Shaya intervened. "I studied at

the Souvalk Synagogue to-day."

Asriel remained grimly uncommunicative.

The young people, reinforced by Tamara, made several other attempts at

conversation, but the dogged taciturnity of the head of the family

cast a spell of misery over them all, and the meal passed in

unsupportable silence.

"See if papa ain't getting on to what you are doing, Shayie," Flora

said, when the two were alone.

"Pshaw! is it the first time you see him out of humor? He must have

had some trouble with a tenant or janitor."

"He must have," she assented gloomily. "But what if he gets wind? I'm

worrying the life out of myself about it."

"So am I. I love your father just the same as if he were my own papa.

I wish the wedding were over, don't you?" he asked in his childish

way.

X

On the following morning Asriel repaired to the Souvalk Synagogue to

attend the service (his usual place of worship he had not the heart to

visit), and, incidentally, to ascertain how Shaya had spent his time

there the day before.

To his consternation he learned that his "daughter's bridegroom" had

not been seen there for weeks.

Asriel held his counsel, and took to shadowing the young man.

He now had no doubt as to the accuracy of Reb Tzalel's story. But it

gave him no pain. It was Shaya no longer; it was not his daughter's

bridegroom; it was not the prodigy he had imported,--it was an

appikoros. But then Asriel's heart withered at the notion of being

the victim of systematic deception. Shaya was an appikoros and a

secret, sneaking enemy.

"That youngster trick Asriel Stroon!" He panted with hatred and

thrilled with a detective-like passion to catch Shaya in the act of

some grave violation of the Mosaic Law.

He went about the various synagogues where the young man was supposed

to study the Talmud, with a keen foretaste of his vicious joy at

finding that he had been playing truant. Yet each time his fervent

expectations were realized he would, instead of triumph, experience an

overpowering sense of defeat.

"You have been cheated out of your boots by a stripling, Asrielke--woe

to your foolish head!" he tortured himself, reveling in an agony of

fury. "Ah, a cholera into him! I'll show him how to fool Asriel

Stroon!"

He discovered that Shaya's frequent companion was his former teacher

of English, whom he often visited in his attic room on Clinton Street,

and he impatiently awaited the next Saturday to raid the atheistic

resort and to overtake Shaya smoking or writing on the holy day. But

the climax came a day or two sooner.

After tracing Shaya to the Clinton Street house Asriel stood waiting

around a corner, at a vantage point from which he could see the

windows of the two garret rooms one of which was the supposed scene of

the young man's ungodly pursuits. He had no definite purpose in view,

for it was not Sabbath, and he would not spoil his game by

apprehending his man in the mere act of reading Gentile books. Yet he

was rooted to the place, and remained aimlessly waiting, with his eyes

riveted to the windows which they could not penetrate. Tired at last,

and overcome with a sense of having been engaged in a fool's errand,

he returned home, and, reaching his bedroom, sank on the bed in a

prostration of hurt pride and impotent rage.

On the following morning he returned to his post. The attic windows

drew him like the evil one, as he put it to himself.

He had been keeping watch for some minutes when, to his fierce joy,

Shaya and his accomplice sallied forth into the street. He dogged

their steps to Grand Street, and thence, through the Bowery, to

Lafayette Place, where they disappeared behind the massive doors of

an imposing structure, apparently neither a dwelling-place nor an

office building.

"Dis a choych?" Asriel asked a passer-by.

"A church? No, it's a library--the Astor Library," the stranger

explained.

"Ah, a lot of Gentile books!" he exclaimed to himself, disappointed in

one way and triumphant in another. The unaccustomed neighborhood and

the novelty of his impressions increased the power of the "evil one"

over him. He took up a position whence he could observe without being

observed, and waited for the two young men to come out. What he would

gain by tracing them back to the Jewish quarter he never asked

himself. He waited because the "evil one" would not let him stir from

the spot.

An hour passed. He was growing faint with hunger; yet he never moved.

"He has not had his lunch, either," he thought. "Still, he can stand

it. It's the witchcraft of the Gentile books--may he be burned to

death!--keeping up his strength. They'll come out in a minute or two."

Many more minutes elapsed, and still Asriel waited. At last "Here,

they are, the convert Jews! Look at them--how jolly! It's the Black

Year shining out of their faces--may they shine on their death-beds!

That beggar of a teacher I shall have arrested."

He followed them through Fourth Street back to the Bowery and down the

rumbling thoroughfare, till--"a lamentation!"--they entered a

Christian restaurant!

A terrific pang smote Asriel's heart. It was as if he saw his temple,

the embodiment of many years of labor, the object of his fondest

cares, just completed and ready to be dedicated, suddenly enveloped in

flames. The prodigy, _his_ prodigy, his Kaddish, his glory in this and

the other world, plunged into the very thick of impurity!

He made to rush after them, but checked himself to wait till the

_treife_[10] food was served them. A few minutes later he made his

entry, cool and collected as a regular customer.

[10] Unclean; not prepared according to the laws of Moses.

Each of the two young men was bent on a veal cutlet. The collegian was

dispatching his with the nonchalant appetite and ease of manner of an

habitué, whereas poor Shaya looked like one affecting to relish his

first plate of raw oysters. The smells proceeding from the kitchen

made him dizzy, and the cutlet itself, partly because he was

accustomed to meat of a better quality, but mainly through the

consciousness of eating treife, inclined him to nausea.

Asriel took a vacant chair at the same table.

"Bless the sitter,[11] Shaya!" he said.

[11] Form of greeting when the host is found at table.

The two young men were petrified.

"How is the pork--does it taste well?" Asriel pursued.

"It is not pork. It is veal cutlet," the teacher found tongue to

retort.

"I am not speaking to you, am I?" Asriel hissed out. Murder was

swelling in his heart. But at this point the waiter came up to his

side.

"Vot'll ye have?"

"Notink!" Asriel replied, suddenly rising from his seat and rushing

out, as if this were the most terrible sort of violence he could

conceive.