Kalmanovitch"s angry voice. A nervous hush fell over the parlor.
Auntie Yetta gave us all an eloquent wink
"There"s a woman with a tongue for you," she said in an undertone.
"Pitch and sulphur. When she opens her mouth people had better sound the fire-alarm." After a pause she added: "Do you know why her teeth are so bad? Her mouth is so full of poison, it has eaten them up."
Presently the younger Mrs. Nodelman made her appearance. Her ruddy "meat-ball" face was fairly ablaze with excitement. Her husband followed with a guilty air
"What"s the matter with you folks?" the hostess said. "Why ainchye doin" somethin"?"
"What shall we do?" the baker"s wife answered in Yiddish. "We have eaten a nice supper and we have heard music and now we are enjoying ourselves quietly, like the gentlemen and the ladies we are. What more do you want?" "Come, folks, let"s have a dance. Bennie will play us a waltz. Quick, Bennie darling! Girls, get a move on you!"
I called the hostess aside. "May I ask you a question, Mrs.
Nodelman?" I said, in the manner of a boy addressing his teacher
"What is it?" she asked, awkwardly.
"No, I won"t ask any questions. I see you are angry at me."
"I ain"t angry at all," she returned, making an effort to look me straight in the face.
"Sure?"
"Sure," with a laugh. "What is it you want to ask me about?"
And again a.s.suming the tone of a penitent pupil, I said, "May I ask Stella to dance with me?"
"But you don"t dance."
"Let her teach me, then."
"Let her, if she wants to. I ain"t her mother, am I?"
"But you have no objection, have you?"
"Where do I come in? On my part, you can dance with every girl in the house."
"Oh, you don"t like me this evening, Mrs. Nodelman. You are angry witn me.
Else you wouldn"t talk the way you do."
She burst into a laugh, and said, "You"re a h.e.l.l of a fellow, you are."
"I know I misbehaved myself, but I couldn"t help it. Miss Kalmanovitch is too fat, you know, and her hands perspire so."
"She"s a charmin" girl," she returned, with a hearty laugh. "I wish her mother was half so good."
"Was she angry, her mother?"
"Was she! She put all the blame on me. I invited her daughter on purpose to make fun of her, she says. My, how she carried on!"
"I"m really sorry, but it"s a matter of taste, you know."
"I know it is. I don"t blame you at all."
"So you and I are friends again, aren"t we?"
She laughed
"Well, then, you have no objection to my being sweet on Stella, have you?"
"You are a h.e.l.l of a fellow. That"s just what you are. But I might as well tell you it"s no use trying to get Stella. She"s already engaged."
"Is she really?"
"Honest."
"Well, I don"t care. I"ll take her away from her fellow. That"s all there is to it." "You can"t do it," she said, gaily. "She is dead stuck on her intended.
They"ll be married in June."
I went home a lovesick man, but the following evening I went to Boston for a day, and my feeling did not survive the trip
CHAPTER V
THAT journey to Boston is fixed in my memory by an incident which is one of my landmarks in the history of my financial evolution and, indeed, in the history of the American cloak industry. It occurred in the afternoon of the Monday which I spent in that city, less than two days after that birthday party at the Nodelmans". I was lounging in an easy-chair in the lobby of my hotel, when I beheld Loeb, the "star" salesman of what had been the "star" firm in the cloak-and-suit business. I had not seen him for some time, but I knew that his employers were on their last legs and that he had a hard struggle trying to make a living. Nor was that firm the only one of the old-established cloak-and-suit concerns that found itself in this state at the period in question--that is, at the time of the economic crisis and the burst of good times that had succeeded it. Far from filling their coffers from the golden flood of those few years, they were drowned in it almost to a man. The trade was now in the hands of men from the ranks of their former employees, tailors or cloak operators of Russian or Galician origin, some of whom were Talmudic scholars like myself. It was the pa.s.sing of the German Jew from the American cloak industry
We did profit by the abundance of the period. Moreover, there were many among us to whom the crisis of 1893 had proved a blessing. To begin with, some of our tailors, being unable to obtain employment in that year, had been driven to make up a garment or two and to offer it for sale in the street, huckster fashion--a venture which in many instances formed a stepping-stone to a cloak-factory. Others of our workmen had achieved the same evolution by employing their days of enforced idleness in taking lessons in cloak-designing, and then setting up a small shop of their own
Newfangled manufacturers of this kind were now springing up like mushrooms.
Joe, my old-time instructor in cloak-making, was one of the latest additions to their number. They worked--often a.s.sisted by their wives and children--in all sorts of capacities and at all hours. They lived on bread and salmon and were content with almost a nominal margin of profit. There were instances when the clippings from the cutting-table const.i.tuted all the profit the business yielded them. Pitted against "manufacturers" of this cla.s.s or against a fellow like myself were the old-established firms, with their dignified office methods and high profit-rates, firms whose fortunes had been sorely tried, to boot, by their bitter struggle with the union
Loeb swaggered up to me with quizzical joviality as usual. But the smug l.u.s.ter of his face was faded and his kindly black eyes had an unsteady glance in them that belied his vivacity. I could see at once that he felt nothing but hate for me
"h.e.l.lo, Get-Rich-Quick Levinsky!" he greeted me. "Haven"t seen you for an age."
"How are you, Loeb?" I asked, genially, my heart full of mixed triumph and compa.s.sion
We had not been talking five minutes before he grew sardonic and venomous.
As Division Street--a few blocks on the lower East Side--was the center of the new type of cloak-manufacturing, he referred to us by the name of that street. My business was on Broadway, yet I was included in the term, "Division Street manufacturer."
"What is Division Street going to do next?" he asked. "Sell a fifteen-dollar suit for fifteen cents?"
I smiled
"That"s a great place, that is. There are two big business streets in New York--Wall Street and Division." He broke into a laugh at his own joke and I charitably joined in. I endeavored to take his thrusts good-naturedly and for many minutes I succeeded, but at one point when he referred to us as "manufacturers," with a sneering implication of quotation marks over the word, I flared up