Ghetto Comedies Part 42

'What do I want?' repeated Pinchas, in sheer amaze.

Kloot, in his peaked cap, emerged from the wings munching a sandwich.

'Sure, there's Shakespeare!' he said. 'I've just been round to the cafe to find you. Got this sandwich there.'

'But this--this isn't the first rehearsal,' stammered Pinchas, a jot appeased.

'The first dress-rehearsal,' Kloot replied rea.s.suringly. 'We don't trouble authors with the rough work. They stroll in and put on the polish. Won't you come on the stage?'

Unable to repress a grin of happiness, Pinchas stumbled through the dim parterre, barking his shins at almost every step. Arrived at the orchestra, he found himself confronted by a chasm. He wheeled to the left, to where the stage-box, shrouded in brown holland, loomed ghostly.

'No,' said Kloot, 'that door's got stuck. You must come round by the stage-door.'

Pinchas retraced his footsteps, barking the smooth remainder of his shins. He allowed himself a palpitating pause before the lobby posters. His blood chilled. Not only was Ignatz Levitsky starred in equal type, but another name stood out larger than either:

_Ophelia_ .. .. .. _f.a.n.n.y Goldwater._

His wrath reflaming, he hurried round to the stage-door. He pushed it open, but a gruff voice inquired his business, and a burly figure blocked his way.

'I am the author,' he said with quiet dignity.

'Authors ain't admitted,' was the simple reply.

'But Goldwater awaits me,' the poet protested.

'I guess not. Mr. Kloot's orders. Can't have authors monkeying around here.' As he spoke Goldwater's voice rose from the neighbouring stage in an operatic melody, and reduced Pinchas's brain to chaos. A despairing sense of strange plots and treasons swept over him. He ran back to the lobby. The doors had been bolted. He beat against them with his cane and his fists and his toes till a tall policeman persuaded him that home was better than a martyr's cell.

Life remained an unintelligible nightmare for poor Pinchas till the first night--and the third act--of the Yiddish 'Hamlet.' He had reconciled himself to his extrusion from rehearsals. 'They fear I fire Ophelia,' he told the cafe.

But a final blow awaited him. No ticket reached him for the premiere; the boxes he had promised the cafe did not materialize, and the necessity of avoiding that haunt of the invited cost him several meals. But that he himself should be refused when he tried to pa.s.s in 'on his face'--that authors should be admitted neither at the stage door nor at the public door--this had not occurred to him as within the possibilities of even theatrical humanity.

'Pigs! Pigs! Pigs!' he shrieked into the box office. 'You and Goldwater and Kloot! Pigs! Pigs! Pigs! I have indeed cast my pearls before swine. But I will not be beholden to them--I will buy a ticket.'

'We're sold out,' said the box-office man, adding recklessly: 'Get a move on you; other people want to buy seats.'

'You can't keep me out! It's conspiracy!' He darted within, but was hustled as rapidly without. He ran back to the stage-door, and hurled himself against the burly figure. He rebounded from it into the side-walk, and the stage-door closed upon his humiliation. He was left cursing in choice Hebrew. It was like the maledictions in Deuteronomy, only brought up to date by dynamite explosions and automobile accidents. Wearying of the waste of an extensive vocabulary upon a blank door, Pinchas returned to the front. The lobby was deserted save for a few strangers; his play had begun. And he--he, the G.o.d who moved all this machinery--he, whose divine fire was warming all that great house, must pace out here in the cold and dark, not even permitted to loiter in the corridors! But for the rumblings of applause that reached him he could hardly have endured the situation.

Suddenly an idea struck him. He hied to the nearest drug-store, and entering the telephone cabinet rang up Goldwater.

'h.e.l.lo, there!' came the voice of Kloot. 'Who are you?'

Pinchas had a vivid vision of the big-nosed youth, in his peaked cap, sitting on the table by the telephone, swinging his legs; but he replied craftily, in a disguised voice: 'You, Goldwater?'

'No; Goldwater's on the stage.'

Pinchas groaned. But at that very instant Goldwater's voice returned to the bureau, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. complacently: 'They're loving it, Kloot; they're swallowing it like ice-cream soda.'

Pinchas tingled with pleasure, but all Kloot replied was: 'You're wanted on the 'phone.'

'h.e.l.lo!' called Goldwater.

'h.e.l.lo!' replied Pinchas in his natural voice. 'May a sudden death smite you! May the curtain fall on a gibbering epileptic!'

'Can't hear!' said Goldwater. 'Speak plainer.'

'I _will_ speak plainer, swine-head! Never shall a work of mine defile itself in your dirty dollar-factory. I spit on you!' He spat viciously into the telephone disk. 'Your father was a _Meshummad_ (apostate), and your mother----'

But Goldwater had cut off the connection. Pinchas finished for his own satisfaction: 'An Irish fire-woman.'

'That was worth ten cents,' he muttered, as he strode out into the night. And patrolling the front of the theatre again, or leaning on his cane as on a sword, he was warmed by the thought that his venom had pierced through all the actor-manager's defences.

At last a change came over the nightmare. Striding from the envied, illuminated Within appeared the Heathen Journalist, note-book in hand.

At sight of the author he shied. 'Must skedaddle, Pin-cuss,' he said apologetically, 'if we're to get anything into to-morrow's paper. Your people are so durned slow--nearly eleven, and only two acts over.

You'll have to brisk 'em up a bit. Good-bye.'

He shook the poet's hand and was off. With an inspiration Pinchas gave chase. He caught the Journalist just boarding a car.

'Got your theatre ticket?' he panted.

'What for?'

'Give it me.'

The Journalist fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and threw him a crumpled fragment. 'What in thunder----' he began. And then, to Pinchas's relief, the car removed the querist.

For the moment the poet was feeling only the indignity of the position, and the Heathen Journalist as trumpeter of his wrongs and avenger of the Muses had not occurred to him. He smoothed out the magic sc.r.a.p, and was inside the suffocating, close-packed theatre before the disconcerted janitor could meet the new situation. Pinchas found the vacated journalistic chair in the stage-box; he was installed therein before the managerial minions arrived on ejection bent.

'This is _my_ house!' screamed Pinchas. 'I stay here! Let me be--swine, serpents, Behemoth!'

'Sh!' came in a shower from every quarter. 'Sit down there! Turn him out!' The curtain was going up; Pinchas was saved.

But only for more gruesome torture. The third act began. Hamlet collogued with the Queen. The poet p.r.i.c.ked up his ears. Whose language was this? Certainly not Shakespeare's or his superior's. Angels and ministers of grace defend him! this was only the illiterate jargon of the hack playwright, with its peppering of the phrases of Hester Street. 'You have too many dead flies on you,' Hamlet's mother told him. 'You'll get left.' But the nightmare thickened. Hamlet and his mother opened their mouths and sang. Their songs were light and gay, and held encore verses to reward the enthusiastic. The actors, like the audience, were leisurely; here midnight and the closure were not synonymous. When there were no more encore verses, Ignatz Levitsky would turn to the audience and bow in acknowledgment of the compliment. Pinchas's eyes were orbs straining at their sockets; froth gathered on his lips.

Mrs. Goldwater bounded on, fantastically mad, her songs set to comic airs. The great house received her in the same comic spirit. Instead of rue and rosemary she carried a rustling green _Lulov_--the palm-branch of the Feast of Tabernacles--and shook it piously toward every corner of the compa.s.s. At each shake the audience rolled about in spasms of merriment. A moment later a white gliding figure, moving to the measure of the cake-walk, keyed up the laughter to hysteria. It was the Ghost appearing to frighten Ophelia. His sepulchral ba.s.s notes mingled with her terror-stricken soprano.

This was the last straw. The Ghost--the Ghost that he had laid forever, the Ghost that made melodrama of this tragedy of the thinker--was risen again, and cake-walking!

Unperceived in the general convulsion and cachinnation, Pinchas leaped to his feet, and, seeing scarlet, bounded through the iron door and made for the stage. But a hand was extended in the nick of time--the hand he had kissed--and Pinchas was drawn back by the collar.

'You don't take your call yet,' said the unruffled Kloot.

'Let me go! I must speak to the people. They must learn the truth.

They think _me_, Melchitsedek Pinchas, guilty of this _tohu-bohu_! My sun will set. I shall be laughed at from the Hudson to the Jordan.'

'Hush! Hush! You are interrupting the poesy.'

'Who has drawn and quartered my play? Speak!'