It was the early part of a bleak wintry evening. The interior of
Silberman's shop, crowded with men and women and their sewing-machines,
every bit of space truckled up with disorderly piles of finished
shirts or bundles of stuff, was dappled with cheerless gaslight.
The spacious, barn-like loft rang and trembled with a chaos of mournful
and merry song, vying with the insolent rattle of the machines.
There were synagogue airs in the chorus and airs of the Jewish
stage; popular American airs, airs from the dancing schools, and
time-honored airs imported from Russia, Poland, Galicia, Roumania,
Hungary.
Only Tanya was not singing. Bent upon her machine, in a remote corner,
she was practicing a straight stitch upon some cuttings. She was
making marked progress, and, flushed with her success, had almost
grown oblivious of the heavy lump at her heart, and the pricking pain
which seemed to fill her every limb. Presently the girl next her, who
had been rapturously singing "I have a girl in Baltimore" in a sort of
cross-tune between the song's own melody and the highly melancholy
strains of a Hebrew prayer, suddenly switched off into one of the most
Russian of Russian folk-songs,--
"By the little brook,
By the little bridge,
Grass was growing"
This she sang with such an un-Russian flavor, and pronounced the words
with such a strong Yiddish accent, and so illiterately, that Tanya
gnashed her teeth as if touched to the quick, and closed her eyes and
ears. The surroundings again grew terrible to her. Commencement Day at
the Kieff Gymnasium loomed before her imagination, and she beheld
herself one of a group of blooming young maidens, all in fresh brown
dresses with black aprons, singing that very song, but in sturdy,
ringing, charming Russian. A cruel anguish choked her. Everybody and
everything about her was so strange, so hideously hostile, so
exile-like! She once more saw the little home where she had recently
reigned. "How do I happen here?" she asked herself. She thought of
Boris, and was tempted to run back to him, to fly into his arms and
beg him to establish a home again. But presently came the image of
Dalsky, neat, polite, dignified, and noiseless; and she once more fell
to her machine, and with a furious cruelty for herself, she went on
working the treadle. Whereupon her mind gradually occupied itself with
the New Year's entertainment, with the way the crowd would be
commenting upon her separation, and above all, with her failure to
appear on the platform to recite in Little Russian and to evoke a
storm of applause in the presence of Dalsky.
At that time Boris was on his way from work, in the direction of
Madison Street. It was the second day after he had cleared the rooms
by selling the furniture and cooking utensils to the neighbors, who
rushed at them like flies at a drop of molasses. But he still had his
books and some other effects to remove. When he entered the rooms,
there was light enough from the street to show the unwonted darkness
in them. A silvery streak fell upon the black aperture which had the
day before been filled with the pipe of a little parlor stove. This
and the weird gloom of the rest of the apartment overwhelmed him with
distress and terror. He hastened to light the gas. The dead emptiness
of the three rooms which so recently had been full of life, the floors
littered with traces of Tanya and their life together--every corner
and recess had a look of doleful, mysterious reproach.
For the first time he seemed to realize what had befallen him; and for
the first time in many years he burst into tears. Hot tears they
were, and they fell in vehement drops, as, leaning his wearied form
against the door-post and burying his face in his arm, he whispered
brokenly, "Tanychka! Tanychka!"