Ghetto Comedies Part 43

'I've only arranged it for the stage,' said Kloot, unabashed.

'You!' gasped the poet.

'You said I and you are the only two men who understand how to treat poesy.'

'You understand push-carts, not poesy!' hissed the poet. 'You conspire to keep me out of the theatre--I will summons you!'

'We had to keep all authors out. Suppose Shakespeare had turned up and complained of _you_.'

'Shakespeare would have been only too grateful.'

'Hush! The boss is going on.'

From the opposite wing Hamlet was indeed advancing. Pinchas made a wild plunge forward, but Kloot's grasp on his collar was still carefully firm.

'Who's mutilating the poesy now?' Kloot frowned angrily from under his peaked cap. 'You'll spoil the scene.'

'Peace, liar! You promised me your wife for Ophelia!'

Kloot's frown relaxed into a smile. 'Sure! The first wife I get you shall have.'

Pinchas gnashed his teeth. Goldwater's voice rose in a joyous roulade.

'I think you owe me a car-fare,' said Kloot soothingly.

Pinchas waved the rejoinder aside with his cane. 'Why does _Hamlet_ sing?' he demanded fiercely.

'Because it's Pa.s.sover,' said Kloot. 'You are a "greener" in New York, otherwise you would know that it is a tradition to have musical plays on Pa.s.sover. Our audiences wouldn't stand for any other. You're such an unreasonable cuss! Why else did we take your "Hamlet" for a Pa.s.sover play?'

'But "Hamlet" isn't a musical play.'

'Yes, it is! How about Ophelia's songs? That was what decided us. Of course they needed eking out.'

'But "Hamlet" is a tragedy!' gasped Pinchas.

'Sure!' said Kloot cheerfully. 'They all die at the end. Our audiences would go away miserable if they didn't. You wait till they're dead, then you shall take your call.'

'Take my call, for _your_ play!'

'There's quite a lot of your lines left, if you listen carefully. Only you don't understand stage technique. Oh, I'm not grumbling; we're quite satisfied. The idea of adapting "Hamlet" for the Yiddish stage is yours, and it's worth every cent we paid.'

A storm of applause gave point to the speaker's words, and removed the last part.i.tion between the poet's great mind and momentary madness.

What! here was that ape of a Goldwater positively wallowing in admiration, while he, the mighty poet, had been cast into outer darkness and his work mocked and crucified! He put forth all his might, like Samson amid the Philistines, and leaving his coat-collar in Kloot's hand, he plunged into the circle of light. Goldwater's amazed face turned to meet him.

'Cutter of lines!' The poet's cane slashed across Hamlet's right cheek near the right eye. 'Perverter of poesy!' It slashed across the left cheek near the left eye.

The Prince of Palestine received each swish with a yell of pain and fear, and the ever-ready Kloot dropped the curtain on the tragic scene.

Such hubbub and hullabaloo as rose on both sides of the curtain! Yet in the end the poet escaped scot-free. Goldwater was a coward, Kloot a sage. The same prudence that had led Kloot to exclude authors, saved him from magnifying their importance by police squabbles. Besides, a clever lawyer might prove the exclusion illegal. What was done was done. The dignity of the hero of a hundred dramas was best served by private beefsteaks and a rumoured version, irrefutable save in a court of law. It was bad enough that the Heathen Journalist should supply so graphic a picture of the midnight melodrama, coloured even more highly than Goldwater's eyes. Kloot had been glad that the Journalist had left before the episode; but when he saw the account he wished the scribe had stayed.

'He won't play Hamlet with that pair of shiners,' Pinchas prophesied early the next morning to the supping cafe.

Radsikoff beamed and refilled Pinchas's gla.s.s with champagne. He had carried out his promise of a.s.sisting at the premiere, and was now paying for the poet's supper.

'You're the first playwright Goldwater hasn't managed to dodge,' he chuckled.

'Ah!' said the poet meditatively. 'Action is greater than Thought.

Action is the greatest thing in the world.'

THE CONVERTS

THE CONVERTS

I

As he sat on his hard stool in the whitewashed workshop on the Bowery, clumsily pasting the flamboyant portrait on the boxes of the 'Yvonne Rupert cigar,' he wondered dully--after the first flush of joy at getting a job after weeks of hunger--at the strange fate that had again brought him into connection, however remote, with stageland. For even to Elkan Mandle, with his Ghetto purview, Yvonne Rupert's fame, both as a 'Parisian' star and the queen of American advertisers, had penetrated. Ever since she had summoned a Jewish florist for not paying her for the hundred and eleven bouquets with which a single week's engagement in vaudeville had enabled her to supply him, the journals had continued to paragraph her amusing, self-puffing adventures.

Not that there was much similarity between the New York star and his little actress of the humble Yiddish Theatre in London, save for that aureole of fluffy hair, which belonged rather to the genus than the individual. But as the great Yvonne's highly-coloured charms went on repeating themselves from every box-cover he manipulated (at seventy-five cents a hundred), the face of his own Gittel grew more and more vivid, till at last the whole splendid, shameful past began to rise up from its desolate tomb.

He even lived through that prologue in the Ghetto garret, when, as benevolent master-tailor receiving the highest cla.s.s work from S.

Cohn's in the Holloway Road, he was called upstairs to a.s.sist the penniless Polish immigrants.

There she sat, the witching she-devil, perched on the rickety table just contributed to the home, a piquant, dark-eyed, yet golden-haired, mite of eleven, calm and comparatively spruce amid the wailing litter of parents and children.

'Settle this among yourselves,' she seemed to be saying. 'When the chairs are here I will sit on _them_; when the table is laid I will draw to; when the pious philanthropist provides the fire I will purr on the hearth.'

Ah, _he_ had come forward as the pious philanthropist--pious enough then, Heaven knew. Why had Satan thrown such lures in the way of the reputable employer, the treasurer of 'The Gates of Mercy' Synagogue, with children of his own, and the best wife in the world? Did he not pray every day to be delivered from the _Satan Mekatrig_? Had he not meant it for the best when he took her into his workshop? It was only when, at the age of sixteen, Gittel Goldstein left the whirring machine-room for the more lucrative and laurelled position of heroine of Goldwater's London Yiddish Theatre that he had discovered how this whimsical, coquettish creature had insinuated herself into his very being.

Ah, madness, madness! that flight with her to America with all his savings, that desertion of his wife and children! But what delicious delirium that one year in New York, prodigal, reckless, ere, with the disappearance of his funds, she, too, disappeared. And now, here he was--after nigh seven apathetic years, in which the need of getting a living was the only spur to living on--glad to take a woman's place when female labour struck for five cents more a hundred. The old bitter tears came up to his eyes, blurring the cheerless scene, the shabby men and unlovely women with their red paste-pots, the medley of bare and coloured boxes, the long shelf of twine-b.a.l.l.s. And as he wept, the vain salt drops moistened the pictures of Yvonne Rupert.

II

She became an obsession, this Franco-American singer and dancer, as he sat pasting and pasting, caressing her pictured face with sticky fingers. There were brief intervals of freedom from her image when he was 'edging' and 'backing,' or when he was lining the boxes with the plain paper; but Yvonne came twice on every box--once in large on the inside, once in small on the outside, with a gummed projection to be stuck down after the cigars were in. He fell to recalling what he had read of her--the convent education that had kept her chaste and distinguished beneath all her stage deviltry, the long Lenten fasts she endured (as brought to light by the fishmonger's bill she disputed in open court), the crucifix concealed upon her otherwise not too reticent person, the adorable French accent with which she enraptured the dudes, the palatial private car in which she traversed the States, with its little chapel giving on the bathroom; the swashbuckling Marquis de St. Roquiere, who had crossed the Channel after her, and the maid he had once kidnapped in mistake for the mistress; the diamond necklace presented by the Rajah of Singapuri, stolen at a soiree in San Francisco, and found afterwards as single stones in a low 'hock-shop' in New Orleans.

And despite all this glitter of imposing images a subconscious thought was forcing itself more and more clearly to the surface of his mind.

That aureole of golden hair, those piquant dark eyes! The Yvonne the cheap ill.u.s.trated papers had made him familiar with had lacked this revelation of colour! But no, the idea was insane!

This scintillating celebrity his lost Gittel!

Bah! Misery had made him childish. Goldwater had, indeed, blossomed out since the days of his hired hall in Spitalfields, but his fame remained exclusively Yiddish and East-side. But Gittel!