The Rise of David Levinsky Part 26

"What difference does it make? Have you ever been in love before?"

"What difference does that make? If you answer my question I shall answer yours." "Well, then, I have never been in love before."

"And I have."

He was intensely interested, and I confided my love story in him, which served to strengthen our friendship still further. When I concluded my narrative he said, thoughtfully: "Of course you don't love Madame Klesmer. I tell you what, Levinsky, you are still in love with Matilda."

I made no answer

"Anyhow, you don't love Madame Klesmer."

This time he said it without reproach. Once I was in love with somebody else I was excused.

The next "season" came around. I was a full-fledged helper now, and, according to the customary arrangement, I received thirty per cent. of what Joe received for my work. This brought me from twenty to twenty-five dollars a week, quite an overwhelming sum, according to my then standard of income and expenditures. I saved about fifteen dollars a week. I shall never forget the day when my capital reached the round figure of one hundred dollars. I was in a flutter. When I looked at the pa.s.sers-by in the street I would say to myself, "These people have no idea that I am worth a hundred dollars."

Another thing I was ever conscious of was the fact that I had earned the hundred dollars by my work. There was a touch of solemnity in my mood, as though I had performed some feat of valor or rendered some great service to the community. I was impelled to convey this feeling to Jake, but when I attempted to put it into words it was somehow lost in a haze and what I said was something quite prosaic

"Guess how much I have in the savings-bank?" I began

"I haven't any idea. How much?"

"Just one hundred."

"Really?"

"Honest. But, then, what does it amount to, after all? Of course, it is pleasant to feel that you have a trade and that you know how to keep a dollar, don't you know."

So far from endearing me to the cloak trade, as might have been expected, the hundred dollars killed at one stroke all the interest I had taken in it.

It lent reality to my vision of college. Cloak-making was now nothing but a temporary round of dreary toil, an unavoidable stepping-stone to loftier occupations

Another year and I should be a fully developed mechanic, working on my own hook--that is, as the immediate employee of some manufacturer or contractor.

"I shall soon be earning forty or fifty dollars a week," I would muse. "At that rate I shall save up plenty of money in much less time than I expected.

I shall spend as little as possible and study as hard as possible."

The Regents' examinations were not exacting in those days. I could have prepared to qualify for admission to a school of medicine, law, or civil engineering in a very short time. But I aimed higher. I knew that many of the professional men on the East Side, and, indeed, everywhere else in the United States, were people of doubtful intellectual equipment, while I was ambitious to be a cultured man "in the European way." There was an odd confusion of ideas in my mind. On the one hand, I had a notion that to "become an American" was the only tangible form of becoming a man of culture (for did not I regard the most refined and learned European as a "greenhorn"?); on the other hand, the impression was deep in me that American education was a cheap machine-made product.

CHAPTER VI

COLLEGE! The sound was forever buzzing in my ear. The seven letters were forever floating before my eyes. They were a magic group, a magic whisper.

Matilda was to hear of me as a college man. What would she say?

"What do you want City College for?" Jake would argue. "Why not take up medicine at once?"

"Once I am to be an educated man I want to be the genuine article," I would reply

Every bit of new knowledge I acquired aroused my enthusiasm. I was in a continuous turmoil of exultation

My plan of campaign was to keep working until I had saved up six hundred dollars, by which time I was to be eligible to admission to the junior cla.s.s of the College of the City of New York, commonly known as City College, where tuition is free. The six hundred dollars was to last me two years--that is, till graduation, when I might take up medicine, engineering, or law. During the height of the cloak season I might find it possible to replenish my funds by an occasional few days at the sewing-machine, or else it ought not to be difficult to support myself by joining the army of private instructors who taught English to our workingmen at their homes

The image of the modest college building was constantly before me. More than once I went a considerable distance out of my way to pa.s.s the corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-third Street, where that edifice stood. I would pause and gaze at its red, ivy-clad walls, mysterious high windows, humble spires; I would stand watching the students on the campus and around the great doors, and go my way, with a heart full of reverence, envy, and hope, with a heart full of quiet ecstasy

It was not merely a place in which I was to fit myself for the battle of life, nor merely one in which I was going to acquire knowledge.

It was a symbol of spiritual promotion as well. University-bred people were the real n.o.bility of the world. A college diploma was a certificate of moral as well as intellectual aristocracy

My old religion had gradually fallen to pieces, and if its place was taken by something else, if there was something that appealed to the better man in me, to what was purest in my thoughts and most sacred in my emotions, that something was the red, church-like structure on the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-third Street

It was the synagogue of my new life. Nor is this merely a figure of speech: the building really appealed to me as a temple, as a House of Sanct.i.ty, as we call the ancient Temple of Jerusalem. At least that was the term I would fondly apply to it, years later, in my retrospective broodings upon the first few years of my life in America

I was impatiently awaiting the advent of the slack season, and when it came at last I applied myself exclusively to the study of subjects required for admission to college. To accelerate matters I engaged, as my instructor in mathematics and geography, the son of our tough-looking presser. I paid him twenty-five cents an hour.

My geography lessons were rapidly dispelling the haze that had enshrouded the universe from me. I beheld the globe hanging in s.p.a.ce, a vast independent world and yet a mere speck among countless myriads of other worlds. Its rotations were so vivid in my mind that I seemed to hear it hum as it spun round and round its axis. The phenomena producing day and night and the four seasons were as real to me as the things that took place in my restaurant. The earth was being disclosed to my mental vision as a whole and in detail. Order was coming out of chaos. Continents, seas, islands, mountains, rivers, countries, were defining themselves out of a misty jumble of meaningless names. Light was breaking all around me. Life was becoming clearer. I was broadening out. I was overborne by a sense of my growing perspicacity

My keenest pleasure was to do geometrical problems, preferably such as contained puzzles in construction. On one occasion I sat up all night and far into the following day over a riddle of this kind. It was about 2 o'clock when I dressed and went to lunch, which was also my breakfast. The problem was still unsolved. I hurried back home as soon as I had finished my meal, went at the problem again, and did not let go until it surrendered.

Odd as it may seem, I found a certain kind of similarity between the lure of these purely mental exercises and the appeal of music.

In both cases I was piqued and hara.s.sed by a personified mystery.

If a tune ran in my mind it would appear as though somebody, I knew not who, was saying something, I knew not what. What was he saying? Who was he? What had happened to him? Was he reciting some grievance, bemoaning some loss, or threatening vengeance? What was he nagging me about? Questions such as these would keep pecking at my heart, and this pain, this excruciating curiosity, I would call keen enjoyment

In like manner every difficult mathematical problem seemed to shelter some unknown fellow who took pleasure in teasing me and daring me to find him. It was the same mischievous fellow, in fact, who used to laugh in my face when I had a difficult bit of Talmud to unravel

"Why, geometry is even deeper than Talmud," I once exclaimed to Jake

"Do you think so?" he answered, indifferently

"I think an interesting geometrical problem is more delicious than the best piece of meat."

"Why don't you live on problems, then? Why spend money on dinners?"

"Smart boy, aren't you?"

"Is doing problems as sweet as being in love?" he demanded, with sheepish earnestness

"You are in love with Madame Klesmer. You ought to know."

He made no answer

On the day when I began these studies I had thirty-six dollars besides the hundred which I kept in the savings-bank. Of this I was now spending, including tuition fees, less than six dollars a week. Every time I changed a dollar my heart literally sank within me. Finally, when my cash was all gone, I borrowed some money of Joe, my "rabbi" at the art of cloak-making.

Breaking the round sum total of my savings-bank account was out of the question. Joe advanced me money more than cheerfully. He was glad to have me in his debt as a pledge of my continuing to work for him. His motive was obvious, and yet I went on borrowing of him rather than draw upon my bank account

One day it crossed my mind that it would be a handsome thing if I looked up Gitelson and paid him the ten dollars I owed him. It was sweet to picture myself telling him how much his ten dollars had done and was going to do for me. I was impatient to call on him, and so I borrowed ten dollars of Joe and betook myself to the factory where I had visited Gitelson several times before. As he was a sample-maker, his work knew no seasons. When I called at that factory I found that he had given up his job there, that he had married and established a small custom-tailor shop somewhere up-town, n.o.body seemed to know where. Joe had not even heard of his marriage. Meanwhile, my enthusiasm for paying him his debt was gone, and I was rather glad that I had not found him

It was the middle of July. The great "winter season" was developing. I felt perfectly competent to make a whole garment unaided. It was doubtful, however, whether I should be readily accepted as an independent mechanic in the shop where I was employed now and where one was in the habit of regarding me as a mere apprentice. So I was determined to seek employment elsewhere. Joe was suspicious. Not that I betrayed my plans in any way. He took them for granted. And so he visited me every day, on all sorts of pretexts, dined me and wined me (if the phrase may be applied to a soda-water dinner), and watched my every step