John Marvel, Assistant Part 62

He ran up the stair and on up a second flight and back along a dark, narrow little pa.s.sage, where he tapped on a door, and, without waiting, walked in.

"Here's a man to see you."

"A gentleman, you mean," I said dryly, and followed him, for I have a particular aversion to being referred to to my face as a mere man. It is not a question of natural history, but of manners.

"Well, Jacob," said Wolffert when he had greeted me, "have you got to the top yet?"

"Will be next week," said Jacob confidently.

I found Wolffert sitting up in a chair, but looking wretchedly ill. He, however, declared himself much better. I learned afterward--though not from him--that he had caught some disease while investigating some wretched kennels known as "lodging houses," where colonies of Jews were packed like herrings in a barrel; and for which a larger percentage on the value was charged as rental than for the best dwellings in the city.

His own little room was small and mean enough, but it was comfortably if plainly furnished, and there were books about, which always give a homelike air, and on a little table a large bunch of violets which instantly caught my eye. By some inexplicable sixth sense I divined that they had come from Eleanor Leigh; but I tried to be decent enough not to be jealous; and Wolffert's manifest pleasure at seeing me made me feel humble.

We had fallen to talking of his work when I said, "Wolffert, why do you live in this horrible quarter? No wonder you get ill. Why don't you get a room in a more decent part of the town--near where John Marvel lives, for instance?"

Wolffert smiled.

"Why?--what is the matter with this?"

"Oh! Why, it is dreadful. Why, it's the dirtiest, meanest, lowest quarter of the city! I never saw such a place. It's full of stinking"--I was going to say "Jews"; but reflected in time to subst.i.tute "holes."

Wolffert, I saw, supplied the omitted objection.

"Do you imagine I would live among the rich?" he demanded; "I thought you knew me better. I don't want to be fattened in the dark like a Strasbourg goose for my liver to make food acceptable to their jaded appet.i.tes. Better be a pig at once."

"No, but there are other places than this--and I should think your soul would revolt at this--" I swung my arm in a half circle.

"Are they not my brethren?" he said, half smiling.

"Well, admit that they are--" (And I knew all along that this was the reason.) "There are other grades--brethren of nearer degree."

"None," he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "'I dwell among my own people'--I must live among them to understand them."

"I should think them rather easy to understand."

"I mean to be in sympathy with them," he said gently. "Besides, I am trying to teach them two or three things."

"What?" For I confess that my soul had revolted at his surroundings.

That surging, foreign-born, foreign-looking, foreign-spoken mult.i.tude who had filled the street as I came along through the vile reek of "Little Russia," as it was called, had smothered my charitable feelings.

"Well, for one thing, to learn the use of freedom--for another, to learn the proper method and function of organization."

"They certainly appear to me to have the latter already--simply by being what they are," I said lightly.

"I mean of business organization," Wolffert explained. "I want to break up the sweat shop and the sweat system. We are already making some headway, and have thousands in various kinds of organized business which are quite successful."

"I should not think they would need your a.s.sistance--from what I saw.

They appear to me to have an instinct."

"They have," said Wolffert, "but we are teaching them how to apply it.

The difficulty is their ignorance and prejudice. You think that they hold you in some distrust and dislike, possibly?" As his tone implied a question, I nodded.

"Well, that is nothing to the way in which they regard me. You they distrust as a gentile, but me they detest as a renegade."

"Well, I must say that I think you deserve what you get for bringing in such a ma.s.s of ignorance. Now, you are an American, and a patriotic one.

How do you reconcile it with your patriotism to introduce into the body politic such an element of ignorance, superst.i.tion, and unrest?"

"Why," said Wolffert, "you don't know our people. The Jew is often an element of ignorance and superst.i.tion, though he is not alone in this, but he is never an element of unrest--when he is justly treated," he added after a pause. "But, whatever these people are in this generation, the next generation--the children of this generation--will be useful American citizens. All they require is a chance. Why, the children of these Russian Jews, baited from their own country, are winning all the prizes in the schools," he added, his pale face flushing faintly. "That lad who showed you in is the son of parents who sell second-hand shoes in the next street and cannot speak a word of English, and yet he stands at the head of his cla.s.s."

"No, second!" I said.

"How do you know?"

"He told me."

"The little rascal! See how proud he is of it," said Wolffert triumphantly.

"He tried to sell me a pair of shoes."

Wolffert chuckled. "Did he?" Then he sobered, catching my thought. "That is the most important thing for him at present, but wait. Let this develop." He tapped his forehead. "He may give you laws equal to Kepler's or a new philosophy like Bacon's. He may solve aerial navigation--or revolutionize thought in any direction--who knows!"

His face had lighted up as he proceeded, and he was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes glowing.

"I know," I said, teasingly. "He'll sell shoes--second-hand ones polished up for new."

I was laughing, but Wolffert did not appreciate my joke. He flushed slightly.

"That's your gentile ignorance, my friend. That's the reason your people are so dense--they never learn--they keep repeating the same thing. No wonder we discover new worlds for you to claim!"

"What new worlds have you discovered?"

"Well, first, Literature, next commerce. What is your oldest boasted scripture?"

"I thought you were talking of material worlds!"

"We helped about that, too--did our full part. You think Queen Isabella p.a.w.ned her jewels to send Christobal Colon to discover America--don't you?"

I nodded.

"Well, the man who put up the money for that little expedition was a Jew--'Arcangel, the Treasurer.' You never heard of him!"

"Never."

"He did it all the same. If you would read something else beside your narrow English writings, Glave, you would learn something of the true history of civilization." Now and then Wolffert's arrogance, like Antipater's, showed through the rents in his raiment.

"What for instance? since you appear to know it all."

"Well, almost any other history or philosophy. Read the work of the thinkers old and new--and see how much deeper life is than the shallow thing called by that divine name by the b.u.t.terflies and insects and reptiles who flaunt their gauzy vans in our faces or fasten their brazen claws in our vitals. Meantime, you might read my book," he said with a smile, "when it comes out."