Ghetto Comedies Part 45

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 a.s.saulting 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 a.s.saulting 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 a.s.serted 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 pa.s.sionate outcries of the old-fashioned _Chazan_, the solemn peals and tremolo notes of the cornet, which had once been merely aesthetic effects to the reputable master-cutter, were now surcharged with doom and chastis.e.m.e.nt. The very sight of the Hebrew books and scrolls touched a thousand memories of home and innocence.

Ah, G.o.d, 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, G.o.d had indeed paid him in kind! Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

The philanthropist himself preached the sermon. G.o.d 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, l.u.s.t of gold that had spurred him across the Atlantic. Now a wiser and sadder man, he would be content with a modic.u.m 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 the crisis. Ah, what a blackguard he had been! And she had brought up the children unaided. Dear Haigitcha! What madness had driven him from her side? But he would make amends--yes, he would make amends. He would slip again into his own niche, take up the old burdens and the old delights--perhaps even be again treasurer of 'The Gates of Mercy.'

He knocked at the door. Haigitcha herself opened it.

He wanted to cry her name, but the word stuck in his throat. For this was not his Haigitcha; this was a new creature, cold, stern, tragic, prematurely aged, framed in the sombre shadows of the staircase. And in her eyes was neither rapture nor remembrance.

'What is it?' she asked.

'I am Elkan; don't you know me?'

She stared with a little gasp, and a heaving of the flat b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Then she said icily: 'And what do you want?'

'I am come back,' he muttered hoa.r.s.ely in Yiddish.

'And where is Gittel?' she answered in the same idiom.

The needles of the whirring machines seemed piercing through his brain. So London knew that Gittel had been the companion of his flight! He hung his head.

'I was only with her one year,' he whispered.

'Then go back to thy dung-heap!' She shut the door.

He thrust his foot in desperately ere it banged to. 'Haigitcha!' he shrieked. 'Let me come in. Forgive me, forgive me!'

It was a tug-of-war. He forced open the door; he had a vision of surprised 'hands' stopping their machines, of a beautiful, startled girl holding the ends of a half-laid tablecloth--his Rachel, oh, his Rachel!

'Open the window, one of you!' panted Haigitcha, her shoulders still straining against the door. 'Call a policeman--the man is drunk!'