Ghetto Comedies Part 39

Sucking voluptuously at Radsikoff's cigar, Pinchas plunged from the steam-heated, cheerful cafe into the raw, unlovely street, still hummocked with an ancient, uncleared snowfall. He did not take the horse-car which runs in this quarter; he was reserving the five cents for a spirituous nightcap. His journey was slow, for a side street that he had to pa.s.s through was, like nearly all the side streets of the great city, an abomination of desolation, a tempestuous sea of frozen, dirty snow, impa.s.sable by all save pedestrians, and scarcely by them. Pinchas was glad of his cane; an alpenstock would not have been superfluous. But the theatre with its brilliantly-lighted lobby and flamboyant posters restored his spirits; the curtain was already up, and a packed ma.s.s filled the house from roof to floor. Rebuffed by the janitors, Pinchas haughtily asked for Goldwater. Goldwater was on the stage, and could not see him. But nothing could down the poet, whose head seemed to swell till it touched the gallery. This great theatre was his, this mighty audience his to melt and fire.

'I will await him in a box,' he said.

'There's no room,' said the usher.

Pinchas threw up his head. 'I am the author of "Hamlet"!'

The usher winced as at a blow. All his life he had heard vaguely of 'Hamlet'--as a great play that was acted on Broadway. And now here was the author himself! All the instinctive sn.o.bbery of the Ghetto toward the grand world was excited. And yet this seedy figure conflicted painfully with his ideas of the uptown type. But perhaps all dramatists were alike. Pinchas was bowed forward.

In another instant the theatre was in an uproar. A man in a comfortable fauteuil had been asked to accommodate the distinguished stranger and had refused.

'I pay my dollar--what for shall I go?'

'But it is the author of "Hamlet"!'

'My money is as good as his.'

'But he doesn't pay.'

'And I shall give my good seat to a _Schnorrer_!'

'Sh! sh!' from all parts of the house, like water livening, not killing, a flame. From every side came expostulations in Yiddish and American. This was a free republic; the author of 'Hamlet' was no better than anybody else. Goldwater, on the stage, glared at the little poet.

At last a compromise was found. A chair was placed at the back of a packed box. American boxes are constructed for publicity, not privacy, but the other dozen occupants bulked between him and the house. He could see, but he could not be seen. Sullen and mortified he listened contemptuously to the play.

It was, indeed, a strange farrago, this romantic drama with which the vast audience had replaced the Sabbath pieties, the home-keeping ritual of the Ghetto, in their swift transformation to American life.

Confined entirely to Jewish characters, it had borrowed much from the heroes and heroines of the Western world, remaining psychologically true only in its minor characters, which were conceived and rendered with wonderful realism by the gifted actors. And this naturalism was shot through with streaks of pure fantasy, so that kangaroos suddenly bounded on in a masque for the edification of a Russian tyrant. But comedy and fantasy alike were subordinated to horror and tragedy: these refugees from the brutality of Russia and Rumania, these inheritors of the wailing melodies of a persecuted synagogue, craved morbidly for gruesomeness and gore. The 'happy endings' of Broadway would have spelled bankruptcy here. Players and audience made a large family party--the unfailing result of a stable stock company with the parts always cast in the same mould. And it was almost an impromptu performance. Pinchas, from his proximity to the stage, could hear every word from the prompter's box, which rose in the centre of the footlights. The Yiddish prompter did not wait till the players 'dried up'; it was his role to read the whole play ahead of them. 'Then you are the woman who murdered my mother,' he would gabble. And the actor, hearing, invented immediately the fit att.i.tude and emphasis, spinning out with elocutionary slowness and pa.s.sion the raw material supplied to him. No mechanical crossing and recrossing the stage, no punctilious tuition by your stage-manager--all was inspiration and fire. But to Pinchas this hearing of the play twice over--once raw and once cooked--was maddening.

'The lazy-bones!' he murmured. 'Not thus shall they treat my lines.

Every syllable must be engraved upon their hearts, or I forbid the curtain to go up. Not that it matters with this fool-dramatist's words; they are ink-vomit, not literature.'

Another feature of the dialogue jarred upon his literary instinct.

Incongruously blended with the Yiddish were elementary American expressions--the first the immigrants would pick up. 'All right,'

'Sure!' 'Yes, sir,' 'Say, how's the boss?' 'Good-bye.' 'Not a cent.'

'Take the elevated.' 'Yup.' 'Nup.' 'That's one on you!' 'Rubber-neck!'

A continuous fusillade of such phrases stimulated and flattered the audience, pleased to find themselves on such easy terms with the new language. But to Pinchas the idea of peppering his pure Yiddish with such locutions was odious. The Prince of Palestine talking with a tw.a.n.g--how could he permit such an outrage upon his Hebrew Hamlet?

Hardly had the curtain fallen on the act than he darted through the iron door that led from the rear of the box to the stage, jostling the cursing carpenters, and pushed aside by the perspiring princ.i.p.als, on whom the curtain was rising and re-rising in a continuous roar. At last he found himself in the little bureau and dressing-room in which Goldwater was angrily changing his trousers. Kloot, the actor-manager's factotum, a big-nosed insolent youth, sat on the table beside the telephone, a peaked cap on his head, his legs swinging.

'Son of a witch! You come and disturb all my house. What do you want?'

cried Goldwater.

'I want to talk to you about rehearsals.'

'I told you I would let you know when rehearsals began.'

'But you forgot to take my address.'

'As if I don't know where to find you!'

Kloot grinned. 'Pinchas gets drinks from all the cafe,' he put in.

'They drink to the health of "Hamlet,"' said Pinchas proudly.

'All right; Kloot's gotten your address. Good-evening.'

'But when will it be? I must know.'

'We can't fix it to a day. There's plenty of money in this piece yet.'

'Money--bah! But merit?'

'You fellows are as jealous as the devil.'

'Me jealous of kangaroos! In Central Park you see giraffes--and tortoises too. Central Park has more talent than this scribbler of yours.'

'I doubt if there's a bigger peac.o.c.k than here,' murmured Goldwater.

'I'll write you about rehearsals,' said Kloot, winking at Goldwater.

'But I must know weeks ahead--I may go lecturing. The great continent calls for me. In Chicago, in Cincinnati----'

'Go, by all means,' said Goldwater. 'We can do without you.'

'Do without me? A nice mess you will make of it! I must teach you how to say every line.'

'Teach _me_?' Goldwater could hardly believe his ears.

Pinchas wavered. 'I--I mean the company. I will show them the accent--the gesture. I'm a great stage-manager as well as a great poet. There shall be no more prompter.'

'Indeed!' Goldwater raised the eyebrow he was pencilling. 'And how are you going to get on without a prompter?'

'Very simple--a month's rehearsals.'

Goldwater turned an apoplectic hue deeper than his rouge.

Kloot broke in impishly: 'It is very good of you to give us a month of your valuable time.'

But Goldwater was too irate for irony. 'A month!' he gasped at last.

'I could put on six melodramas in a month.'

'But "Hamlet" is not a melodrama!' said Pinchas, shocked.

'Quite so; there is not half the scenery. It's the scenery that takes time rehearsing, not the scenes.'

The poet was now as purple as the player. 'You would profane my divine work by gabbling through it with your pack of parrots!'

'Here, just _you_ come off your perch!' said Kloot. 'You've written the piece; we do the rest.' Kloot, though only nineteen and at a few dollars a week, had a fine, careless equality not only with the whole world, but even with his employer. He was now, to his amaze, confronted by a superior.