Yekl Part 8

"She looks a veritable _panenke_,"[15] she remarked, with hidden sarcasm. "Was she born here?"

[15] A young n.o.blewoman.

"_Nu_, but she has been very long here. She speaks English like one American born. We are used to speak in English when we talk _shop_. She came to ask me about a _job_."

Gitl reflected that with Bernstein Jake was in the habit of talking shop in Yiddish, although the boarder could even read English books, which her husband could not do.

CHAPTER VI.

CIRc.u.mSTANCES ALTER CASES.

Jake was left by Mamie in a state of unspeakable misery. He felt discomfited, crushed, the universal b.u.t.t of ridicule. Her perfumes lingered in his nostrils, taking his breath away. Her venomous gaze stung his heart. She seemed to him elevated above the social plane upon which he had recently (though the interval appeared very long) stood by her side, nay, upon which he had had her at his beck and call; while he was degraded, as it were, wallowing in a mire, from which he yearningly looked up to his former equals, vainly begging for recognition. An uncontrollable desire took possession of him to run after her, to have an explanation, and to swear that he was the same Jake and as much of a Yankee and a gallant as ever. But here was his wife fixing him with a timid, piteous look, which at once exasperated and cowed him; and he dared not stir out of the house, as though nailed by that look of hers to the spot.

He lay down on the lounge, and shut his eyes. Gitl dutifully brought him a pillow. As she adjusted it under his head the touch of her hand on his face made him shrink, as if at the contact with a reptile. He was anxious to flee from his wretched self into oblivion, and his wish was soon gratified, the combined effect of a hard day's work and a plentiful and well-relished supper plunging him into a heavy sleep.

While his snores resounded in the little kitchen, Gitl put the child to bed, and then pa.s.sed with noiseless step into the boarders' room. The door was ajar and she entered it without knocking, as was her wont. She found Bernstein bent over a book, with a ponderous dictionary by its side. A kerosene lamp with a red shade, occupying nearly all the remaining s.p.a.ce on the table, spread a lurid mysterious light. Gitl asked the studious cloakmaker whether he knew a Polish girl named Mamie Fein.

"Mamie Fein? No. Why?" said Bernstein, with his index finger on the pa.s.sage he had been reading, and his eyes on Gitl's plumpish cheek, bathed in the roseate light.

"Nothing. May not one ask?"

"What is the matter? Speak out! Are you afraid to tell me?" he insisted.

"What should be the matter? She was here. A nice _lada_."

"Your husband knows many nice _ladies_," he said, with a faint but significant smile. And immediately regretting the remark he went on to smooth it down by characterizing Jake as an honest and good-natured fellow.

"You ought to think yourself fortunate in having him for your husband,"

he added.

"Yes, but what did you mean by what you said first?" she demanded, with an anxious air.

"What did I mean? What should I have meant? I meant what I said. _'F cou'se_ he knows many girls. But who does not? You know there are always girls in the shops where we work. Never fear, Jake has nothing to do with them."

"Who says I fear! Did I say I did? Why should I?"

Encouraged by the cheering effect which his words were obviously having on the credulous, unsophisticated woman, he pursued: "May no Jewish daughter have a worse husband. Be easy, be easy. I tell you he is melting away for you. He never looked as happy as he does since you came."

"Go away! You must be making fun of me!" she said, beaming with delight.

"Don't you believe me? Why, are you not a pretty young woman?" he remarked, with an oily look in his eye.

The crimson came into her cheek, and she lowered her glance.

"Stop making fun of me, I beg you," she said softly. "Is it true?"

"Is what true? That you are a pretty young woman? Take a looking-gla.s.s and see for yourself."

"Strange man that you are!" she returned, with confused deprecation. "I mean what you said before about Jake," she faltered.

"Oh, about Jake! Then say so," he jested. "Really he loves you as life."

"How do you know?" she queried, wistfully.

"How do I know!" he repeated, with an amused smile. "As if one could not see!"

"But he never told you himself!"

"How do you know he did not? You have guessed wrongly, see! He did, lots of times," he concluded gravely, touched by the anxiety of the poor woman.

She left Bernstein's room all thrilling with joy, and repentant for her excess of communicativeness. "A wife must not tell other people what happens to her husband," she lectured herself, in the best of humours.

Still, the words "Your husband knows many nice _ladas_," kept echoing at the bottom of her soul, and in another few minutes she was at Mrs.

Kavarsky's, confidentially describing Mamie's visit as well as her talk with the boarder, omitting nothing save the latter's compliments to her looks.

Mrs. Kavarsky was an eccentric, scraggy little woman, with a vehement manner and no end of words and gesticulations. Her dry face was full of warts and surmounted by a chaotic ma.s.s of ringlets and curls of a faded brown. None too tidy about her person, and rather slattern in general appearance, she zealously kept up the over-scrupulous cleanliness for which the fame of her apartments reached far and wide. Her neighbours and townsfolk p.r.o.nounced her crazy but "with a heart of diamond," that is to say, the diametrical opposite of the precious stone in point of hardness, and resembling it in the general sense of excellence of quality. She was neighbourly enough, and as she was the most prosperous and her establishment the best equipped in the whole tenement, many a woman would come to borrow some cooking utensil or other, or even a few dollars on rent day, which Mrs. Kavarsky always started by refusing in the most pointed terms, and almost always finished by granting.

She started to listen to Gitl's report with a fierce mien which gradually thawed into a sage smile. When the young neighbour had rested her case, she first nodded her head, as who should say, "What fools this young generation be!" and then burst out:

"Do you know what _I_ have to tell you? Guess!"

Gitl thought Heaven knows what revelations awaited her.

"That you are a lump of horse and a greenhorn and nothing else!" (Gitl felt much relieved.) "That piece of ugliness should _try_ and come to _my_ house! Then she would know the price of a pound of evil. I should open the door and--_march_ to eighty black years! Let her go to where she came from! America is not Russia, thanked be the Lord of the world.

Here one must only know how to handle a husband. Here a husband must remember '_ladas foist_'--but then you do not even know what that means!" she exclaimed, with a despairing wave of her hand.

"What does it mean?" Gitl inquired, pensively.

"What does it mean? What should it mean? It means but too well, _never min'_. It means that when a husband does not _behabe_ as he should, one does not stroke his cheeks for it. A prohibition upon me if one does.

If the wife is no greenhorn she gets him shoved into the oven, over there, across the river."

"You mean they send him to prison?"

"Where else--to the theatre?" Mrs. Kavarsky mocked her furiously.

"A weeping to me!" Gitl said, with horror. "May G.o.d save me from such things!"

In due course Mrs. Kavarsky arrived at the subject of head-gear, and for the third or fourth time she elicited from her pupil a promise to discard the kerchief and to sell the wig.

"No wonder he does hate you, seeing you in that horrid rag, which makes a grandma of you. Drop it, I tell you! Drop it so that no survivor nor any refugee is left of it. If you don't obey me this time, dare not cross my threshold any more, do you hear?" she thundered. "One might as well talk to the wall as to her!" she proceeded, actually addressing herself to the opposite wall of her kitchen, and referring to her interlocutrice in the third person. "I am working and working for her, and here she appreciates it as much as the cat. Fie!" With which the irate lady averted her face in disgust.

"I shall take it off; now for sure--as sure as this is Wednesday," said Gitl, beseechingly.

Mrs. Kavarsky turned back to her pacified.