"Besides, I am sick of these 'interesting points.' They have been the
ruin of us, Tanychka; they eat us up alive, these 'interesting
points'--the deuce grab them. If I cared less about 'interesting
points'"--he articulated the two words with venomous relish--"and a
little more about your future and mine, I might not now have to stick
in a button factory."
She listened to him with an amused air, and when he paused, she said
flippantly:--
"We have heard it before."
"So much the worse for both of us. If you at least took a more sober
view of things! Seriously, Tanya, you ought to make life a burden to
me until I begin to do something to get out of this devilish--of this
villainous, unpardonable position."
"You should have married Cecilia Trotzky, then," she said, laughing.
Cecilia Trotzky was the virago among the educated Russo-Jewish
immigrants, who form a numerous colony within a colony in the Ghetto
of New York. She was described as a woman who had placed her husband
in a medical college, then made a point of sending him supperless to
bed every time he failed to study his lessons, and later, when he was
practicing, fixed the fees with his patients.
"Well, what is the use of joking?" he said gloomily, suppressing a
smile. "Every illiterate nonentity," he went on, letting the words
filter through his teeth with languid bitterness, "every shop clerk,
who at home hardly knew there was such a thing as a university in the
world, goes to college here; and I am serving the community by
supplying it with pearl buttons for six dollars a week. Would this
were regular, at least! But it is not. I forgot to tell you, but we
may again have a slack season, Tanya. Oh! I will not let things go on
like this. If I don't begin to do something at once, I shall send a
bullet through my forehead. You may laugh, but this time it is not
idle talk. From this day on I shall be a different man. I have a plan;
I have considered everything carefully. If we wish to get rid of our
beggarly position, of this terrible feeling of insecurity and need,"
he proceeded, as he raised himself to a sitting posture, his voice
gathering energy and his features becoming contorted with an
expression of disgust; "if we really mean to free ourselves from this
constant trembling lest I lose my job, from these excursions to the
pawn shops--laugh away! laugh away!--but, as I say, if we seriously
wish to make it possible for me to enter some college here, we must
send all literature and magazines and all gush about Russia to the
deuce, and do as others do. I have a splendid plan. Everything depends
upon you, Tanya."
At this the childlike look of curiosity came into her face. But he
seemed in no hurry to come to the point.
"People who hang about pawn shops have no right to 'interesting
points' and Guy de Maupassant and that sort of luxury. Poverty is a
crime! Well, but from now on, everything will be different. Listen,
Tanychka; the greatest trouble is the rent, is it not? It eats up the
larger part of my wages--that is, provided I work full time; and you
know how we tremble and are on the verge of insanity each time the
first of the month is drawing near. If we wish to achieve something,
we must be satisfied to pinch ourselves and to put up with some
inconvenience. Above all, we must not forget that I am a common
workingman. Well, every workingman's family around here keeps a
boarder or two; let us also take one. There is no way out of it,
Tanya."
He uttered the concluding words with studied nonchalance, but without
daring to look her in the face.
"Borya!" she exclaimed, with a bewildered air.
Her manner angered him.
"There, now! I expected as much!" he said irascibly. And continuing in
softer accents, he forced her to listen to the details of his project.
The boarder's pay would nearly come up to their rent. If they lived
more economically than now they could save up enough for his first
year's tuition at a New York college, or, as a stepping-stone, for a
newspaper stand. Free from worry about their rent, he would be in a
fitter mood to study English after work. In course of time he would
know the language enough to teach it to the uneducated workingmen of
the Jewish quarter; and so he would be liberated from his factory
yoke, as many an immigrant of his class had been. Dalsky, a friend of
theirs, and a former classmate of Boris's, who was studying medicine,
earned his living by giving such lessons in English, and, by the way,
he was now looking for a lodging. Why should they not offer him their
parlor? They could do with the kitchen and the bedroom. Besides,
Dalsky would be one of the family, and would have only partial use of
the parlor.
As the plan assumed a personified form in her mind--the face of a
definite boarder--her realization of its horrors was so keen that she
shut her ears and begged Boris to take pity on her and desist.
Whereupon he flew into a rage and charged her with nursing
aristocratic instincts which in their present position they could not
afford. She retorted, tearfully, that she was ready to put up with any
amount of additional work and discomfort, but that she did not care to
have a "constant cataract on the eye."
"God knows you give me little enough of your company, as it is. I must
have tired you capitally, if you seek somebody to talk to and to save
you from being alone with me."
"You know it is the rankest nonsense you are saying!" he flamed out.
"And what is the use crying like that? As if I took a delight in the
whole affair! Cry to our circumstances, not to me. Circumstances,
circumstances, Tanya!" he repeated, with pleading vehemence.
Little by little he relented, however, and eventually he promised
never to mention the matter again, although inwardly both of them felt
that he would. He sat by her side on the lounge, fondling her little
hands and murmuring love, when suddenly bending upon him an imploring
face, she said, in a tremulous, tearful voice: "Borinka, dear! I shall
also go to some factory. We will get along without boarders," with
which she fell upon his shoulder in a fit of heartrending sobbing.
He clasped her to him, whispering: "You know, my angel, that I would
commit suicide before letting you go to work. Don't worry, my joy, we
_will_ get along without boarders."
"I want no strangers to hang around the house all the time; I want to
be with you alone, I want nobody, nobody, nobody else in the world!"
she said, pressing him tightly to her heart.