"You don"t seem to like the Division Street manufacturers, do you?" I said.
"I suppose you have a reason for it." "I have a reason? Of course I have," he retorted. "So has every other decent man in the business."
"It depends on what you call decent. Every misfit claims to be more decent than the fellow who gets the business."
He grew pale. It almost looked as though we were coming to blows. After a pause he said, with an effect of holding himself in leash: "Business! Do you call that business? I call it peanuts."
"Well, the peanuts are rapidly growing in size while the oranges and the apples are shrinking and rotting. The fittest survives." ("A lot he knows about the theory of the survival of the fittest!" I jeered in my heart. "He hasn"t even heard the name of Herbert Spencer.") "Peanuts are peanuts, that"s all there"s to it," he returned
"Then why are you excited? How can we hurt you if we are only peanuts?"
He made no answer
"We don"t steal the trade we"re getting, do we? If the American people prefer to buy our product they probably like it."
"Oh, chuck your big words, Levinsky. You fellows are killing the trade, and you know it."
He laughed, but what I said was true. The old cloak-manufacturers, the German Jews, were merely merchant. Our people, on the other hand, were mostly tailors or cloak operators who had learned the mechanical part of the industry, and they were introducing a thousand innovations into it, perfecting, revolutionizing it. We brought to our work a knowledge, a taste, and an ardor which the men of the old firms did not possess. And we were shedding our uncouthness, too. In proportion as we grew we adapted American business ways
Speaking in a semi-amicable vein, Loeb went on citing cases of what he termed cutthroat compet.i.tion on our part, till he worked himself into a pa.s.sion and became abusive again. The drift of his harangue was that "smashing" prices was something distasteful to the American spirit, that we were only foreigners, products of an inferior civilization, and that we ought to know our place.
"This way of doing business may be all right in Russia, but it won"t do in this country," he said. "I tell you, it won"t do."
"But it does do. So it seems."
As he continued to fume and rail at us, and I sat listening with a bored air, an idea flashed upon my mind, and, acting upon it on the spur of the moment, I suddenly laid a friendly hand on his arm
"Look here, Loeb," I said. "What"s the use being excited? I have a scheme.
What"s the matter with you selling goods for me?"
He was taken aback, but I could see that he was going to accept it
"What do you mean?" he asked, flushing
"I mean what I say. I want you to come with me. You will make more money than you have ever made before. You"re a first-rate salesman, Loeb, and--well, it will pay you to make the change.
What do you say?"
He contemplated the floor for a minute or two, and then, looking up awkwardly, he said: "I"ll think it over. But you"re a smart fellow, Levinsky. I can tell you that."
We proceeded to discuss details, and I received his answer--a favorable one--before we left our seats
To celebrate the event I had him dine with me that evening, our pledges of mutual loyalty being solemnized by a toast which we drank in the costliest champagne the hotel restaurant could furnish
It was not a year and a half after this episode that Chaikin entered my employ as designer
CHAPTER VI
I SAW other girls with a view to marriage, but I was "too particular," as my friends, the Nodelmans, would have it.
I had two narrow escapes from breach-of-promise suits.
"He has too much education," Nodelman once said to his wife in my presence.
"Too much in his head, don"t you know. You think too much, Levinsky. That"s what"s the matter. First marry, and do your thinking afterward. If you stopped to think before eating you would starve to death, wouldn"t you? Well, and if you keep on thinking and figuring if this girl"s nose is nice enough and if that girl"s eyes are nice enough, you"ll die before you get married, and there are no weddings among the dead, you know."
My matrimonial aspirations made themselves felt with fits and starts. There were periods when I seemed to be completely in their grip, when I was restless and as though ready to marry the first girl I met. Then there would be many months during which I was utterly indifferent, enjoying my freedom and putting off the question indefinitely
Year after year slid by. When my thirty-ninth birthday became a thing of the past and I saw myself entering upon my fortieth year without knowing who I worked for I was in something like a state of despair. When I was a boy forty years had seemed to be the beginning of old age. This notion I now repudiated as ridiculous, for I felt as young as I had done ten, fifteen, or twenty years before; and yet the words "forty years" appalled me. The wish to "settle down" then grew into a pa.s.sion in me. The vague portrait of a woman in the abstract seemed never to be absent from my mind.
Coupled with that portrait was a similarly vague image of a window and a table set for dinner. That, somehow, was my symbol of home. Home and woman were one, a complex charm joining them into an inseparable force. There was the glamour of s.e.x, shelter, and companionship in that charm, and of something else that promised security and perpetuity to the successes that fate was pouring into my lap. It whispered of a future that was to continue after I was gone
My loneliness often took on the pungence of acute physical discomfort. The more I achieved, the more painful was my self-pity
Nothing seemed to matter unless it was sanctified by marriage, and marriage now mattered far more than love
Girls had acquired a new meaning. They were not merely girls.
They were matrimonial possibilities
Odd as it may appear, my romantic ideals of twenty years ago now rea.s.serted their claim upon me. It was my ambition to marry into some orthodox family, well-to-do, well connected, and with an atmosphere of Talmudic education--the kind of match of which I had dreamed before my mother died, with such modifications as the American environment rendered natural
There were two distinct circ.u.mstances to account for this new mood in me
In the first place, my sense of approaching middle age somehow rekindled my yearning interest in the scenes of my childhood and boyhood. Memories of bygone days had become ineffably dear to me. I seemed to remember things of my boyhood more vividly than I did things that had happened only a year before
I was homesick for Antomir again
To revisit Abner"s Court or the Preacher"s Synagogue, to speak to Reb Sender, or to the bewhiskered old soldier, the skeepskin tailor, if they were still living, was one of my day-dreams.
Eliakim Zunzer, the famous wedding-bard whose songs my mother used to sing in her dear, sonorous contralto, had emigrated to America several years before and I had heard of it at the time of his arrival, yet I had never thought of going to see him. Now, however, I could not rest until I looked him up. It appeared that he owned a small printing-shop in a bas.e.m.e.nt on East Broadway, so I called at his place one afternoon on the pretext of ordering some cards. When I saw the poet--an aged little man with a tragic, tired look on a cadaverous face--I was so unstrung that when a young man in the shop asked me something about the cards, he had to repeat the question before I understood it
"My mother used to sing your beautiful songs, Mr. Zunzer," I said to the poet some minutes later, my heart beating violently again.
"Did she? Where do you come from?" he asked, with a smile that banished the tired look, but deepened the tragic sadness of his death-like countenance
Everything bearing the name of my native place touched a tender spot in my heart. It was enough for a cloak-maker to ask me for a job with the Antomir accent to be favorably recommended to one of my foremen. A number of the men who received special consideration and were kept working in my shop in the slack seasons, when my force was greatly reduced, were fellow-townspeople of mine. This had been going on for several years, in fact, till gradually an Antomir atmosphere had been established in my shop, and something like a family spirit of which I was proud. We had formed a Levinsky Antomir Benefit Society of which I was an honorary member and which was made up, for the most part, of my own employees
All this, I confess, was not without advantage to my business interests, for it afforded me a low average of wages and safeguarded my shop against labor troubles. The Cloak-makers"
Union had again come into existence, and, although it had no real power over the men, the trade was not free from sporadic conflicts in individual shops. My place, however, was absolutely immune from difficulties of this sort--all because of the Levinsky Antomir Benefit Society
If one of my operatives happened to have a relative in Antomir, a women"s tailor who wished to emigrate to America, I would advance him the pa.s.sage money, with the understanding that he was to work off the loan in my employ.
That the "green one" was to work for low wages was a matter of course. But then, in justice to myself, I must add that I did my men favors in numerous cases that could in no way redound to my benefit. Besides, the fiscal advantages that I did derive from the Antomir spirit of my shop really were not a primary consideration with me. I sincerely cherished that spirit for its own sake.
Moreover, if my Antomir employees were willing to accept from me lower pay than they might have received in other places, their average earnings were actually higher than they would have been elsewhere. I gave them steady work. Besides, they felt perfectly at home in my shop. I treated them well. I was very democratic
Compared to the thoughts of home that had oppressed me during my first months in America, my new visions of Antomir were like the wistful lights of a sunset as compared with the glare of midday. But then sunsets produce deeper, if quieter, effects on the emotions than the strongest daylight
It was my new homesickness, then, which inclined me to an American form of the kind of marriage of which I used to dream in the days of my Talmudic studies. Another motive that led me to matrimonial aspirations of this kind lay in my new ideas of respectability as a necessary accompaniment to success. Marrying into a well-to-do orthodox family meant respectability and solidity. It implied law and order, the ant.i.thesis of anarchism, socialism, trade-unionism, strikes