"Wail, bride, wail!
This is a time of tears.
Think of thy past days:
Alas! they are gone to return nevermore."
Heedless of the convulsive sobbing with which the room resounded, he
continued to declaim, and at last, his eye flashing fire and his voice
tremulous with emotion, he sang out in a dismal, uncanny high key:--
"And thy good mother beyond the seas,
And thy father in his grave
Near where thy cradle was rocked,--
Weep, bride, weep!
Though his soul is better off
Than we are here underneath
In dearth and cares and ceaseless pangs,--
Weep, sweet bride, weep!"
Then, in the general outburst that followed the extemporaneous verse,
there was a cry,--"The bride is fainting! Water! quick!"
"Murderer that you are!" flamed out an elderly matron, with an air of
admiration for the bard's talent as much as of wrath for the
far-fetched results it achieved.
Goldy was brought to, and the rest of the ceremony passed without
accident. She submitted to everything as in a dream. When the
bridegroom, escorted by two attendants, each carrying a candelabrum
holding lighted candles, came to place the veil over her face, she
stared about as though she failed to realize the situation or to
recognize Nathan. When, keeping time to the plaintive strains of a
time-honored tune, she was led, blindfolded, into the large hall and
stationed beside the bridegroom under the red canopy, and then marched
around him seven times, she obeyed instructions and moved about with
the passivity of a hypnotic. After the Seven Blessings had been
recited, when the cantor, gently lifting the end of her veil,
presented the wineglass to her lips, she tasted its contents with the
air of an invalid taking medicine. Then she felt the ring slip down
her finger, and heard Nathan say, "Be thou dedicated to me by this
ring, according to the laws of Moses and Israel."
Whereupon she said to herself, "Now I am a married woman!" But
somehow, at this moment the words were meaningless sounds to her. She
knew she was married, but could not realize what it implied. As Nathan
crushed the wineglass underfoot, and the band struck up a cheerful
melody, and the gathering shouted, "Good luck! Good luck!" and clapped
their hands, while the older women broke into a wild hop, Goldy felt
the relief of having gone through a great ordeal. But still she was
not distinctly aware of any change in her position.
Not until fifteen minutes later, when she found herself in the
basement, at the head of one of three long tables, did the realization
of her new self strike her consciousness full in the face, as it were.
The dining-room was nearly as large as the dancing-hall on the floor
above. It was as brightly illuminated, and the three tables, which
ran almost its entire length, were set for a hundred and fifty guests.
Yet there were barely twenty to occupy them. The effect was still more
depressing than in the dancing-room. The vacant benches and the
untouched covers still more agonizingly exaggerated the emptiness of
the room, in which the sorry handful of a company lost themselves.
Goldy looked at the rows of plates, spoons, forks, knives, and they
weighed her down with the cold dazzle of their solemn, pompous array.
"I am not the Goldy I used to be," she said to herself. "I am a
married woman, like mamma, or auntie, or Mrs. Volpiansky. And we have
spent every cent we had on this grand wedding, and now we are left
without money for furniture, and there are no guests to send us any,
and the supper will be thrown out, and everything is lost, and I am to
blame for it all!"
The glittering plates seemed to hold whispered converse and to
exchange winks and grins at her expense. She transferred her glance to
the company, and it appeared as if they were vainly forcing themselves
to partake of the food,--as though they, too, were looked out of
countenance by that ruthless sparkle of the unused plates.
Nervous silence hung over the room, and the reluctant jingle of the
score of knives and forks made it more awkward, more enervating, every
second. Even the bard had not the heart to break the stillness by the
merry rhymes he had composed for the occasion.
Goldy was overpowered. She thought she was on the verge of another
fainting spell, and, shutting her eyes and setting her teeth, she
tried to imagine herself dead. Nathan, who was by her side, noticed
it. He took her hand under the table, and, pressing it gently,
whispered, "Don't take it to heart. There is a God in heaven."
She could not make out his words, but she felt their meaning. As she
was about to utter some phrase of endearment, her heart swelled in her
throat, and a piteous, dovelike, tearful look was all the response she
could make.
By and by, however, when the foaming lager was served, tongues were
loosened, and the bard, although distressed by the meagre collection
in store for him, but stirred by an ardent desire to relieve the
insupportable wretchedness of the evening, outdid himself in offhand
acrostics and witticisms. Needless to say that his efforts were
thankfully rewarded with unstinted laughter; and as the room rang with
merriment, the gleaming rows of undisturbed plates also seemed to join
in the general hubbub of mirth, and to be laughing a hearty, kindly
laugh.
Presently, amid a fresh outbreak of deafening hilarity, Goldy bent
close to Nathan's ear and exclaimed with sobbing vehemence, "My
husband! My husband! My husband!"
"My wife!" he returned in her ear.
"Do you know what you are to me now?" she resumed. "A husband! And I
am your wife! Do you know what it means,--_do_ you, _do_ you, Nathan?"
she insisted, with frantic emphasis.
"I do, my little sparrow; only don't worry over the wedding presents."
* * * * *
It was after midnight, and even the Ghetto was immersed in repose.
Goldy and Nathan were silently wending their way to the three empty
little rooms where they were destined to have their first joint home.
They wore the wedding attire which they had rented for the evening: he
a swallowtail coat and high hat, and she a white satin gown and
slippers, her head uncovered,--the wreath and veil done up in a
newspaper, in Nathan's hand.
They had gone to the wedding in carriages, which had attracted large
crowds both at the point of departure, and in front of the hall; and
of course they had expected to make their way to their new home in a
similar "respectable" manner. Toward the close of the last dance,
after supper, they found, however, that some small change was all they
possessed in the world.
The last strains of music were dying away. The guests, in their hats
and bonnets, were taking leave. Everybody seemed in a hurry to get
away to his own world, and to abandon the young couple to their fate.
Nathan would have borrowed a dollar or two of some friend. "Let us go
home as behooves a bride and bridegroom," he said. "There is a God in
heaven: he will not forsake us."
But Goldy would not hear of betraying the full measure of their
poverty to their friends. "No! no!" she retorted testily. "I am not
going to let you pay a dollar and a half for a few blocks' drive, like
a Fifth Avenue nobleman. We can walk," she pursued, with the grim
determination of one bent upon self-chastisement. "A poor woman who
dares spend every cent on a wedding must be ready to walk after the
wedding."
When they found themselves alone in the deserted street, they were so
overcome by a sense of loneliness, of a kind of portentous, haunting
emptiness, that they could not speak. So on they trudged in dismal
silence; she leaning upon his arm, and he tenderly pressing her to his
side.
Their way lay through the gloomiest and roughest part of the Seventh
Ward. The neighborhood frightened her, and she clung closer to her
escort. At one corner they passed some men in front of a liquor
saloon.
"Look at dem! Look at dem! A sheeny fellar an' his bride, I'll betch
ye!" shouted a husky voice. "Jes' comin' from de weddin'."
"She ain't no bigger 'n a peanut, is she?" The simile was greeted with
a horse-laugh.
"Look a here, young fellar, what's de madder wid carryin' dat lady of
yourn in your vest-pocket?"
"When Nathan and Goldy were a block away, something like a potato or a
carrot struck her in the back. At the same time the gang of loafers on
the corner broke into boisterous merriment. Nathan tried to face
about, but she restrained him.
"Don't! They might kill you!" she whispered, and relapsed into
silence.
He made another attempt to disengage himself, as if for a desperate
attack upon her assailants, but she nestled close to his side and held
him fast, her every fibre tingling with the consciousness of the
shelter she had in him.
"Don't mind them, Nathan," she said.
And as they proceeded on their dreary way through a sombre,
impoverished street, with here and there a rustling tree,--a
melancholy witness of its better days,--they felt a stream of
happiness uniting them, as it coursed through the veins of both, and
they were filled with a blissful sense of oneness the like of which
they had never tasted before. So happy were they that the gang behind
them, and the bare rooms toward which they were directing their steps,
and the miserable failure of the wedding, all suddenly appeared too
insignificant to engage their attention,--paltry matters alien to
their new life, remote from the enchanted world in which they now
dwelt.
The very notion of a relentless void abruptly turned to a beatific
sense of their own seclusion, of there being only themselves in the
universe, to live and to delight in each other.
"Don't mind them, Nathan darling," she repeated mechanically,
conscious of nothing but the tremor of happiness in her voice.
"I should give it to them!" he responded, gathering her still closer
to him. "I should show them how to touch my Goldy, my pearl, my
birdie!"
They dived into the denser gloom of a side-street.
A gentle breeze ran past and ahead of them, proclaiming the bride and
the bridegroom. An old tree whispered overhead its tender
felicitations.