Ghetto Comedies Part 59

But the owl was haggling with the telephone. 'Three hundred and fifteen! What! Do you want to skin _me_, like your martins and sables?'

'You are busy,' interposed David, fretting at the waste of his day. 'I shall take the liberty of calling again.'

A telephone-book soon betrayed the Bundist's shop, and David hurried off to enlist him. The shopkeeper proved, however, so corpulent and bovine that David's heart sank. But he began bluntly: 'I know you're a Bundist.'

'A what?' said the fur-dealer.

David smiled. 'Oh, you needn't pretend with me; I'm a fighter myself.'

He let a revolver peep out of his hip-pocket.

'Help! _Gewalt!_' cried the fur-dealer.

A beardless youth came running out of the back room. David laughed.

'Herr Cantberg told me that you were a Bundist,' he explained to the shopkeeper. 'And I came to meet a kindred spirit. But I was warned Herr Cantberg is always wrong. Good-morning.'

'Stop!' cried the youth. 'Go in, Reb Yitzchok; let me deal with this fire-eater.' And as the corpulent man retired with an improbable alacrity, he continued gravely: 'This time Herr Cantberg was not more than a hundred versts from the truth.'

David smiled. '_You_ are the Bundist.'

'Hush! Here I am the son-in-law. I study Talmud and eat _Kest_ (free food). What news from Warsaw?'

'I want both you and your father-in-law,' said David evasively--'his money and your muscles.'

'He gives no money to the Cause, save unwillingly what I squeeze out of Cantberg.' The youth permitted himself his first smile. 'When he deals with that bourgeois at the telephone, I always egg him on to stand out for more and more, and my profit is half the extra roubles we extort. But as for myself, my life, of course, is at the disposal of headquarters.'

David was moved by this refreshing simplicity. He felt a little embarra.s.sment in explaining that headquarters to him meant _Samooborona_, not Bund. The youth's countenance changed completely.

'Defend the Jews!' he cried contemptuously. 'What have we to do with the Jewish bourgeoisie?'

'The Bund is exclusively Jewish, is it not?'

'Merely because we found the rest of the Revolutionary body too clumsy for words. It was always getting caught, its printing-presses exhumed, its leaders buried. So we split off, the better to help our fellow-working-men. But we are a Labour party, not a Jewish party. We have the whole Russian Revolution on our shoulders; how can we throw away our lives for the capitalists of the Milovka Ghetto? Then there are the elections at hand--I have to work for the Left. Ah, here come some of our bourgeois; ask _them_, if you like. I will keep my father-in-law out of the shop.'

Two men in close confabulation strolled in, a third disconnected, but on their heels. With five Jews the concourse soon became a congress.

One of the couple turned out to be a Progressive Pole. He mistook David for a Zionist, and denounced him for a foreigner.

'We of the P.P.P.,' he said, 'will peacefully acquire equal rights with our fellow-Poles--nay, we shall be allowed to become Poles ourselves. But you Zionists are less citizens than strangers, and if you were logical, you would all----'

'Where's your own logic?' interrupted the disconnected man. 'Why don't you join the P.P.N. at once?'

The Progressive Pole frowned. 'The Nationalists! They are anti-Semites. I'd as soon join the League of True Russian Men.'

'And do you trust the P.P.P.?' his companion asked him. 'I tell you, Nathan, that only in the Progressive Democratic Party, with its belief in the equality of all nationalities----'

'If you want a Party free from anti-Semites,' David intervened desperately, 'you must join the _Samoo_----'

'I fear you will get no recruits here,' interrupted the Bundist, not unkindly. He added with a sneer: 'These gentlemen of the P.P.P. and the P.P.N. and the P.P.D. are all good Poles.'

'Good Poles!' echoed David no less bitterly. 'And the Poles voted _en bloc_ to keep every Jewish candidate out of the Duma.'

'Even so we must be better Poles than they,' sublimely replied the member of the P.P.P. 'We are joining even the Clerical Parties of the Right for the good of our country. And now that the Party of National Concentration----'

'Go to the Labour Parties,' advised the P.D. 'There you may perchance find st.u.r.dy young men with the necessary Ghetto taint.' Of the four great Labour Parties, he proceeded to recommend the P.S.D. as the most promising for David's purposes. 'Not the Bolshewiki faction,' he added, 'but the Menshewiki. Recruits might also be found in the Proletariat or the P.P.S.----'

'No, I've tried the P.P.S.,' said David. 'But at any rate, gentlemen, since you must all see that the defence of our own lives is no undesirable object, a little contribution to our funds----'

A violent chorus of protest broke out. It was scarcely credible that only four men were speaking. All explained elaborately that they had their own Party Funds, and what a tax it was to run their candidates for the Duma, not to mention their Party Organ.

'You see,' said the Bundist, 'your only chance lies with the men of no Party, who have only their own bourgeois pleasures.'

'Are there such?' asked David eagerly.

A universal laugh greeted this inquiry.

'Alas, too many!' everybody told him. 'Our people are such individualists.'

'But where are these individualists?' cried David desperately.

As if in answer, the bovine proprietor, encouraged by the laughter, crept in again.

'You still here!' he murmured to David, taken aback.

'Yes, but if you'll give me a subscription for Jewish Self-Defence----'

'Jewish Emanc.i.p.ation!' cried the fur-dealer. 'Why didn't you say so at first?' He put his hand in his pocket. 'That's _my_ Party--or rather the National Group in it, the Anti-Zionist faction.'

The stern Bundist laughed. 'No, he doesn't mean he's a J.E. even of the other faction.'

His father-in-law took his hand out of his pocket.

David cast a rebuking glance at the Bundist. 'Why did you interfere?

Perhaps my way may prove the shortest to Jewish Emanc.i.p.ation.'

His hearers smiled a superior smile, and the fur-dealer shook his head. 'I belong also to the Promotion of Education Party--I am for peaceful methods,' he announced.

'So I perceived,' said David drily.

To be rid of him, the Bundist gave him the address of a man who kept aloof from Polish politics--a bourgeois cousin of his, Belchevski by name, who might just as well be killed off in the _Samooborona_.

But even Belchevski turned out to be a Territorialist. David imprudently told him he had seen his fellow-Territorialist Grodsky, who had half promised----

'a.s.sociate with a brainless, b.u.mptious platform-screamer!' he screamed. 'He's worse than the hysterical Zionists. It is a territory we need, not Socialism.'

'I agree. But even more do we need Self-Defence.'

'The only Self-Defence is to leave Russia for a land of our own.'

'Five and a quarter million of us? Why, if two ships--one from Libau for the north, and one from Odessa for the south--sailed away every week, each bearing two thousand pa.s.sengers, it would take over a quarter of a century. And by that time a new generation of us would have grown up.'