"Which?"
"Guess."
"The tall one."
"I thought she"d be the one you"d pick. You"ll have to guess again."
"What made you think I"d pick her for a college girl?" "You"ll have to guess that, too. Well, she is an educated girl, all the same."
She volunteered the further information that the tall girl"s father was a writer, and, as though anxious lest I should take him too seriously, she hastened to add: "He doesn"t write English, though.
It"s Jewish, or Hebrew, or something."
"What"s his name?" I asked
"Tevkin," she answered, under her breath
The name sounded remotely familiar to me. Had I seen it in some Yiddish paper? Had I heard it somewhere? The intellectual East Side was practically a foreign country to me, and I was proud of the fact. I knew something of its orthodox Talmudists, but scarcely anything of its modern men of letters, poets, thinkers, humorists, whether they wrote in Yiddish, in Hebrew, in Russian, or in English. If I took an occasional look at the socialist Yiddish daily it was chiefly to see what was going on in the Cloak-makers"
Union. Otherwise I regarded everything that was written for the East Side with contempt, and "East Side writer" was synonymous with "greenhorn" and "tramp." Worse than that, it was identified in my mind with socialism, anarchism, and trade-unionism. It was something sinister, absurd, and uncouth
But Miss Tevkin was a beautiful girl, nevertheless. So I pitied her for being the daughter of an East Side writer
The tennis game did not last long. Miss Tevkin and her companion soon went indoors. I went out for a stroll by myself. I was thinking of my journey to Tannersville the next morning. The enforced loss of time chafed me. Of the strong impression which the tall girl had produced on me not a trace seemed to have been left. She bothered me no more than any other pretty girl I might have recently come across. Young women with strikingly interesting faces and figures were not rare in New York
I had not been walking five minutes when I impatiently returned to the hotel to consult the time-tables
CHAPTER II
I WAS chatting with Rivesman, the lessee of the hotel, across the counter that separated part of his office from the lobby. As I have said, I had known him for many years. He had formerly been in the insurance business, and he had at one time acted as my insurance broker. He was a Talmudist, and well versed in modern Hebrew literature, to boot. He advised me concerning trains to Tannersville, and then we pa.s.sed to the hotel business and mutual acquaintances
Presently Miss Tevkin, apparently on her way from her room, paused at the counter, by my side, to leave her key. She was dressed for dinner, although it was not yet half past 4 o"clock and the great Sat.u.r.day-evening repast, for which train after train was bringing husbands and other "weekenders" to the mountains, was usually a very late affair
The dress she now wore was a modest gown of navy blue trimmed with lace. The change of attire seemed to have produced a partial change in her ident.i.ty.
She was interesting in a new way, I thought
"Going to enjoy the fresh air?" Rivesman asked her, gallantly
"Ye-es," she answered, pleasantly. "It"s glorious outside." And she vanished
"Pretty girl," I remarked
"And a well-bred one, too--in the real sense of the word."
"One of your two-week guests, I suppose," I said, with studied indifference.
"Yes. She is a stenographer." Whereupon he named a well-known lawyer, a man prominent in the affairs of the Jewish community, as her employer. "It was an admirer of her father who got the job for her."
From what followed I learned that Miss Tevkin"s father had once been a celebrated Hebrew poet and that he was no other than the hero of the romance of which Naphtali had told me a few months before I left my native place to go to America, and that her mother was the heroine of that romance. In other words, her mother was the once celebrated beauty, the daughter of the famous Hebrew writer (long since deceased), Doctor Rachaeless of Odessa
"It was her father, then, who wrote those love-letters!" I exclaimed, excitedly. "And it was about her mother that he wrote them!
Somebody told me on the veranda that her name was Miss Tevkin. I did think the name sounded familiar, but I could not locate it." The discovery stirred me inordinately. I was palpitating with reminiscent interest and with a novel interest in the beautiful girl who had just stood by my side
At my request Rivesman, followed by myself, sought her out on the front porch and introduced me to her as "a great admirer of your father"s poetry."
Seated beside her was a bald-headed man with a lone wisp of hair directly over his forehead whom the hotel-keeper introduced as "Mr. Shapiro, a counselor," and who by his manner of greeting me showed that he was fully aware of my financial standing
The old romance of the Hebrew poet and his present wife, and more especially the fact that I had been thrilled by it in Antomir, threw a halo of ineffable fascination around their beautiful daughter
"So you are a daughter of the great Hebrew poet," I said in English
"It"s awfully kind of you to speak like that," she returned
"Mr. Levinsky is known for his literary tastes, you know," Shapiro put in
"I wish I deserved the compliment," I rejoined. "Unfortunately, I don"t. I am glad I find time to read the newspapers
"The newspapers are life," observed Miss Tevkin, "and life is the source of literature, or should be."
""Or should be!"" Shapiro mocked her, fondly. "Is that a dig at the popular novels?" And in an aside to me, "Miss Tevkin has no use for them, you know."
She smiled
"Still worshiping at the shrine of Ibsen?" he asked her
"More than ever," she replied, gaily.
"I admire your loyalty, though I regret to say that I am still unable to share your taste."
"It isn"t a matter of taste," she returned. "It depends on what one is looking for in a play or a novel."
She smiled with the air of one abstaining from a fruitless discussion
"She"s a blue-stocking," I said to myself. "Women of this kind are usually doomed to be old maids." And yet she drew me with a magnetic force that seemed to be beyond my power of resistance
It was evident that she enjoyed the discussion and the fact that it was merely a pretext for the lawyer to feast his eyes on her
I wondered why a bald-headed man with a lone tuft of hair did not repel her
A younger brother of Shapiro"s, a real-estate broker, joined us. He also was bald-headed, but his baldness formed a smaller patch than the lawyer"s
The two brothers did most of the talking, and, among other things, they informed Miss Tevkin and myself that they were graduates of the City College. With a great display of reading and repeatedly interrupting each other they took up the cudgels for the "good old school." I soon discovered, however, that their range was limited to a small number of authors, whose names they uttered with great gusto and to whom they returned again and again. These were Victor Hugo, Dumas, d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Coleridge, Edgar Poe, and one or two others. If the lawyer added a new name, like Walter Pater, to his list, the real-estate man would hasten to trot out De Quincey, for example. For the rest they would parade a whole array of writers rather than refer to any one of them in particular. The more they fulminated and fumed and bullied Miss Tevkin the firmer grew my conviction that they had scarcely read the books for which they seemed to be ready to lay down their lives
Miss Tevkin, however, took them seriously. She followed them with the air of a "good girl "listening to a lecture by her mother or teacher
"I don"t agree with you at all," she would say, weakly, from time to time, and resume listening with charming resignation
The noise made by the two brothers attracted several other boarders. One of these was a slovenly-looking man of forty-five who spoke remarkably good English with a very bad accent (far worse than mine). That he was a Talmudic scholar was written all over his face. By profession he was a photographer.