Ghetto Comedies - Israel Zangwill (great novels of all time txt) 📗

she would play my Ophelia as well as Mrs. Goldwater,' Pinchas added zestfully.

'They say she has a Yiddish accent,' Elkan ventured again.

The table roared louder. 'I have heard of Yiddish-Deutsch,' cried Pinchas, 'never of Yiddish-Français!'

Elkan Mandle was frozen. By his disappointment he knew that he had been hoping to meet Gittel again—that his resentment was dead.

IV

But the hope would not die. He studied the theatrical announcements, and when Yvonne Rupert once again flashed upon New York he set out to see her. But it struck him that the remote seat he could afford—for it would not do to spend a week's wage on the mere chance—would be too far off for precise identification, especially as she would probably be theatrically transmogrified. No, a wiser as well as a more economical plan would be to meet her at the stage-door, as he used to meet Gittel. He would hang about till she came.

It was a long ride to the Variety Theatre, and, the weather being sloppy, there was not even standing-room in the car, every foot of which, as it plunged and heaved ship-like through the watery night, was a suffocating jam of human beings, wedged on the seats, or clinging tightly to the overhead straps, or swarming like stuck flies on the fore and hind platforms, the squeeze and smell intensified by the shovings and writhings of damp passengers getting in and out, or by the desperate wriggling of the poor patient collector of fares boring his way through the very thick of the soldered mass. Elkan alighted with a headache, glad even of the cold rain that sprinkled his forehead. The shining carriages at the door of the theatre filled him for once with a bitter revolt. But he dared not insinuate himself among the white-wrapped, scented women and elegant cloaked men, though he itched to enter the portico and study the pictures of Yvonne Rupert, of which he caught a glimpse. He found his way instead to the stage-door, and took up a position that afforded him a complete view of the comers and goers, if only partial shelter from the rain.

But the leaden hours passed without her, with endless fevers of expectation, heats followed by chills. The performers came and went, mostly on foot, and strange nondescript men and women passed too through the jealously-guarded door.

He was drenched to the skin with accumulated drippings ere a smart brougham drove up, a smart groom opened an umbrella, and a smart—an unimaginably smart—Gittel Goldstein alighted.

Yes, the incredible was true!

Beneath that coquettish veil, under the aureole of hair, gleamed the piquant eyes he had kissed so often.

He remained petrified an instant, dazed and staring. She passed through the door the groom held open. The doorkeeper, from his pigeon-hole, handed her some letters. Yes, he knew every trick of the shoulders, every turn of the neck. She stood surveying the envelopes. As the groom let the door swing back and turned away, he rushed forward and pushed it open again.

'Gittel!' he cried chokingly. 'Gittel!'

She turned with a quick jerk of the head, and in her flushed, startled face he read consciousness if not recognition. The reek of her old cherry-blossom smote from her costlier garments, kindling a thousand passionate memories.

'Knowest thou me not?' he cried in Yiddish.

In a flash her face, doubly veiled, was a haughty stare.

'Who is zis person?' she asked the doorkeeper in her charming French-English.

He reverted to English.

'I am Elkan, your own Elkan!'

Ah, the jostle of sweet and bitter memories. So near, so near again! The same warm seductive witch. He strove to take her daintily-gloved hand.

She shrank back shudderingly and thrust open the door that led to the dressing-rooms beside the stage.

'Ze man is mad, lunatic!' And she disappeared with that delicious shrug of the shoulders that had captivated the States.

Insensate fury overcame him. What! This creature who owed all this glory to his dragging her away from the London Ghetto Theatre, this heartless, brazen minx who had been glad to nestle in his arms, was to mock him like this, was to elude him again! He made a dash after her; the doorkeeper darted from his little room, but was hurled aside in a swift, mad tussle, and Elkan, after a blind, blood-red instant, found himself blinking and dripping in the centre of the stage, facing a great roaring audience, tier upon tier. Then he became aware of a pair of eccentric comedians whose scene he had interrupted, and who had not sufficient presence of mind to work him into it, so that the audience which had laughed at his headlong entrance now laughed the louder over its own mistake.

But its delightful moment of sensational suspense was brief. In a twinkling the doorkeeper's vengeful hands were on the intruder's collar.

'I want Yvonne Rupert!' shrieked Elkan struggling. 'She is mine—mine! She loved me once!'

A vaster wave of laughter swept back to him as he was hauled off, to be handed over to a policeman on a charge of brawling and assaulting the doorkeeper.

V

As he lay in his cell he chewed the cud of revenge. Yes, let them take him before the magistrate; it was not he that was afraid of justice. He would expose her, the false Catholic, the she-cat! A pretty convert! Another man would have preferred to blackmail her, he told himself with righteous indignation, especially in such straits of poverty. But he—the thought had scarcely crossed his mind. He had not even thought of her helping him, only of the joy of meeting her again.

In the chill morning, after a sleepless night, he had a panic-stricken sense of his insignificance under the crushing weight of law and order. All the strength born of bitterness oozed out as he stood before the magistrate rigidly and heard the charge preferred. He had a despairing vision of Yvonne Rupert, mocking, inaccessible, even before he was asked his occupation.

'In a cigar-box factory,' he replied curtly.

'Ah, you make cigar-boxes?'

'No, not exactly. I paste.'

'Paste what?'

He hesitated. 'Pictures of Yvonne Rupert on the boxes.'

'Ah! Then it is the "Yvonne Rupert" cigar?'

'Yes.' He had divined the court's complacent misinterpretation ere he saw its smile; the facile theory that brooding so much over her fascinating picture had unhinged his brain. From that moment a hardness came over his heart. He shut his lips grimly. What was the use of talking? Whatever he said would be discredited on this impish theory. And, even without it, how incredible his story, how irrelevant to the charge of assaulting the doorkeeper!

'I was drunk,' was all he would say. He was committed for trial, and, having no one to bail him out, lingered in a common cell with other reprobates till the van brought him to the Law Court, and he came up to justice in an elevator under the rebuking folds of the Stars and Stripes. A fortnight's more confinement was all that was meted out to him, but he had already had time enough to reflect that he had given Yvonne Rupert one of the best advertisements of her life. It would have enhanced the prisoner's bitterness had he known, as the knowing world outside knew, that he was a poor devil in Yvonne Rupert's pay, and that New York was chuckling over the original and ingenious dodge by which she had again asserted her sovereignty as an advertiser—delicious, immense!

VI

Short as his term of imprisonment was it coincided, much to his own surprise, with the Jewish Penitential period, and the Day of Atonement came in the middle. A wealthy Jewish philanthropist had organized a prison prayer-service, and Elkan eagerly grasped at the break in the monotony. Several of the prisoners who posed as Jews with this same motive were detected and reprimanded; but Elkan felt, with the new grim sense of humour that meditation on Yvonne Rupert and the world she fooled was developing in him, that he was as little of a Jew as any of them. This elopement to America had meant a violent break with his whole religious past. Not once had he seen the inside of an American synagogue. Gittel had had no use for synagogues.

He entered the improvised prayer-room with this ironic sense of coming back to Judaism by the Christian prison door. But the service shook him terribly. He forgot even to be amused by the one successful impostor who had landed himself in an unforeseen deprivation of rations during the whole fast day. The passionate outcries of the old-fashioned Chazan, the solemn peals and tremolo notes of the cornet, which had once been merely æsthetic effects to the reputable master-cutter, were now surcharged with doom and chastisement. The very sight of the Hebrew books and scrolls touched a thousand memories of home and innocence.

Ah, God, how he had sinned!

'Forgive us now, pardon us now, atone for us now!' he cried, smiting his breast and rocking to and fro.

His poor deserted wife and children! How terrible for Haigitcha to wake up one morning and find him gone! As terrible as for him to wake up one morning and find Gittel gone. Ah, God had indeed paid him in kind! Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

The philanthropist himself preached the sermon. God could never forgive sins till the sinner had first straightened out the human wrongs.

Ah, true, true! If he could only find his family again. If he could try by love and immeasurable devotion to atone for the past. Then again life would have a meaning and an aim. Poor, poor Haigitcha! How he would weep over her and cherish her. And his children! They must be grown up. Yankely must be quite a young man. Yes, he would be seventeen by now. And Rachel, that pretty, clinging cherub!

In all those years he had not dared to let his thoughts pause upon them. His past lay like a misty dream behind those thousand leagues of ocean. But now it started up in all the colours of daylight, warm, appealing. Yes, he would go back to his dear ones who must still crave his love and guidance; he would plead and be forgiven, and end his days piously at the sacred hearth of duty.

'Forgive us now, pardon us now, atone for us now!'

If only he could get back to old England.

He appealed to the philanthropist, and lied amid all his contrition. It was desperation at the severance from his wife and children that had driven him to drink, lust of gold that had spurred him across the Atlantic. Now a wiser and sadder man, he would be content with a modicum and the wife of his bosom.

VII

He arrived at last, with a few charity coins in his pocket, in the familiar Spitalfields alley, guarded by the three iron posts over which he remembered his Yankely leaping. His heart was full of tears and memories. Ah, there was the butcher's shop still underneath the old apartment, with the tin labels stuck in the kosher meat, and there was Gideon, the fat, genial butcher, flourishing his great carving-knife as of yore, though without that ancient smile of brotherly recognition. Gideon's frigidity chilled him; it was an inauspicious omen, a symptom of things altered, irrevocable.

'Does Mrs. Mandle still live here?' he asked with a horrible heart-sinking.

'Yes, first floor,' said Gideon, staring.

Ah, how his heart leapt up again! Haigitcha, his dear Haigitcha! He went up the ever-open dusty staircase jostling against a spruce, handsome young fellow who was hurrying down. He looked back with a sudden conviction that it was his son. His heart swelled with pride and affection; but ere he could cry 'Yankely' the young fellow was gone. He heard the whirr of machines. Yes, she had kept on the workshop, the wonderful creature, though crippled by his loss and the want of capital. Doubtless S. Cohn's kind-hearted firm had helped her to tide over