"Why?" I asked, also reddening
I was sorely hurt and he noticed it
"I know that you do it whole-heartedly," he hastened to explain, "but I don"t want to feel that you do it for my sake."
"But I don"t do it for your sake. I just want to help the paper. Can"t I--" He interrupted me with a.s.surances of his regard for me and for my motives, and accepted the check.
Was he dreaming of Anna ultimately agreeing to marry me--and my money? He certainly considered me a most desirable match.
But I felt sure that he was fond of me on my personal account and that he would have liked to have me for his son-in-law even if my income had not exceeded three or four thousand dollars a year. He did not share the radical views of his children. He was much nearer to my point of view than they
CHAPTER V
IT was December. There was an air of prosperity in Tevkin"s house, but the girls would not give up their jobs. I was a frequent caller again. I was burning to take Anna, Elsie, and their parents to the theater, but was afraid the two girls would spurn the invitation
One day I was agreeably surprised by Elsie asking me to buy some tickets for a socialist ball. They were fifty cents apiece
"How many do you want me to take?" I asked
"As many as you can afford," she answered, roguishly
"Will you sell me twenty-five dollars" worth?"
"Oh, that would be lovely!" she said, in high glee
When I handed her the money I was on the brink of asking if it might not be rejected as "tainted," but suppressed the pleasantry
For me to attend a socialist ball would have meant to face a crowd of union men. It was out of the question. But the twenty-five dollars somehow brought me nearer to Elsie, and that meant to Anna also. I began to feel more at home in their company. Elsie was as dear as a sister to me. I went so far as to venture to invite them and their parents to the opera, and my invitation was accepted. I was still merely "a friend of father"s," something like an uncle, but I saw a ray of hope now
"Suppose a commonplace business man like myself offered you a check for Minority," I once said to Anna.
"A check for Minority?" she echoed, with joyful surprise. "Well, it would be accepted with thanks, of course, but you would first have to withdraw the libel "the commonplace business man."
Another condition is that you must promise to read the magazine."
As I was making out the check I told her that I had read some issues of it and that I "solemnly swore" to read it regularly now.
That I had found it an unqualified bore I omitted to announce.
Shortly after that opera night Tevkin provided a box at one of the Jewish theaters for a play by Jacob Gordin
I was quite chummy with the girls. They would jokingly call me "Mr.
Capitalist" and, despite their father"s protests, "bleed" me for all sorts of contributions. One of these came near embroiling me with Moissey. It was for a revolutionary leader, a Jew, who had recently escaped from a Siberian prison in a barrel of cabbage and whose arrival in New York (by way of j.a.pan and San Francisco) had been the great sensation of the year among the socialists of the East Side. The new-comer was the founder of a party of terrorists and had organized a plot which had resulted in the killing of an uncle of the Czar and of a prime minister. Now, Moissey, in his rabid, uncompromising way, sympathized with another party of Russian revolutionists, with one that was bitterly opposed to the theories and methods of the terrorists. So when he learned that Anna was collecting funds for the man who had been smuggled out of jail in a barrel, and that I had given her a check for him, he flared up and called her "busybody."
"You had better mind your own affairs, Moissey," she retorted, coloring
She essayed to defend her position, contending that the methods of the Russian Government rendered terrorism not only justifiable, but inevitable
"The question is not whether it is justifiable, but whether there is any sense to it," Moissey replied, sneeringly. "Revolutions are not made by plotting or bomb-throwing. They must take the form of an uprising by the ma.s.ses."
"As if the Russian terrorists did not have the ma.s.ses back of them!
The peasantry and the educated cla.s.ses are with them."
"How do you know they are?" Moissey asked, with a good-natured, but patronizing, smile
He spoke of the Russian working cla.s.s as the great element that was destined to work out the political and economic salvation of the country, and at this he tactlessly dwelt on the Russian trade-unions, on what he termed their revolutionary strikes, and upon the aid Russian capitalists gave the Government in its crusade upon the struggle for liberty
I felt quite awkward. I wondered whether he was not saying these things designedly to punish me for the check I had given Anna for the terrorists.
He had always seemed to hold aloof from me, as if he were opposed to the visits of the "money-bag" that I was at his father"s house. At this minute I felt as though his eyes said, "The idea of this fleecer of labor contributing to the struggle for liberty!"
I was burning to tell him that he lacked manners, and to a.s.sail trade-unionism, but I restrained myself, of course
Sometimes the girls and I would discuss the social question or literature, subjects upon which they a.s.sured me that I held "nave" views. But all my efforts to get Anna into a more intimate conversation failed. For all our familiarity, it seemed as if we held our conversations through a thick window-pane. Nevertheless, in a very vague way, and for no particular reason that I was aware of, I thought that I sensed encouragement
Tevkin never again approached me with his real-estate ventures, but the very air of his house these days was full of such ventures. I met other real-estate men at his home. Their talk was tempting.
my enormous income notwithstanding. Huge fortunes seemed to be growing like mushrooms all over the five Ghettos of New York and Brooklyn. I saw men who three years ago had not been worth a cent and who were now buying and selling blocks of property.
How much they were actually worth was a question which in the excitement of the "boom" did not seem to matter. It is never a rare incident among our people for a man with a nebulous fortune of a few hundred dollars to plunge into a commercial undertaking involving many thousands; but during that period this was an every-day affair. At first I treated it like something that was going on in another country. But I had a good deal of uninvested money and my resistance was slackening.
At last I succ.u.mbed
One of the men I met at Tevkin"s was Volodsky, the old-time street peddler, the man of the beautiful teeth whose push-cart had adjoined mine in those gloomy days when I tried to sell goods in the streets, and who had told me of the dower-money which his sister had lent him for his journey to America.
I had not seen him since then--an interval of over twenty years--and we recognized each other with some difficulty
The real-estate boom had found him eking out a wretched livelihood by selling goods on the instalment plan. Most of his business had been in the Italian quarter and he had learned to speak Italian far more fluently than he had English. A short time before I stumbled upon him at the Tevkins" he had built an enormous block of high, brick apartment-houses in Harlem. He had gone into the undertaking with only five thousand dollars of his own, and before the houses were half completed he had sold them all, pocketing an enormous profit. When we were peddlers together he had been considered a failure and a fool. He now struck me as a clever fellow, full of dash.
Nor did Volodsky represent the only metamorphosis of this kind that I came across. It was as though there were something in the atmosphere which turned paupers into capitalists and inane milksops into men of brains and pluck.
Volodsky succeeded in luring me into a network of speculations
Tevkin had an interest in some of these operations, and, as they were mostly concerned with property in Harlem or in the Bronx, his house became my real-estate headquarters. There were two cla.s.ses of callers at his home now: the socialists and the literary men or artists who visited Tevkin"s children and the "real-estate crowd" who came to see Tevkin himself. It came to be tacitly understood that the library was to be left to the former, while the dining-room, in the bas.e.m.e.nt, was used as Tevkin"s office. Being "a friend of the family," I had the freedom of both
"You"re making a big mistake, Levinsky," Nodelman once said to me, with a gesture of deep concern. "What is biting you? Aren"t you making money fast enough? Mark my word, if you try to swallow too fast you"ll choke. Any doctor will tell you that."
I urged him to join me, but he would not hear of it. Instead, he exhorted me to sell out my holdings and give all my attention to my cloak business
"Take pity on your hard-earned pennies, Levinsky," he would say.
"Else you"ll wake up some day like the fellow who has dreamed he has found a treasure. He"s holding on to the treasure tight, and when he opens his eyes he finds it"s nothing but a handful of wind." "I"ll tell you what, Levinsky," he began on one occasion.
"You ought to see some of those magician fellows."
"What for?" I asked
"Did you ever see them at their game? They"ll put an egg into a hat; say, "One, two, three," and pull out a chicken. And then they say, "One, two, three," again and there"s neither a chicken nor an egg. That"s the way all this real-estate racket will end. Mark my word, Levinsky."
Bender nagged and pleaded with me without let-up. If I had had the remotest doubt of his devotion to me it would have been dispelled now. I was at my great mahogany desk every morning, as usual, but I seldom stayed more than two hours, and even during those two hours my mind was divided between cloaks and real estate or between cloaks and Anna. Bender was practically in full charge of the business. Instead, however, of welcoming the power it gave him, he made unrelenting efforts to restore things to their former state. He was constantly haranguing me on the risks I was incurring, beseeching me to drop my new ventures, and threatening to leave me unless I did so. Once, as he was thus expostulating with me, he broke down
"I appeal to you as your friend, as your old-time teacher," he said, and burst into tears
If it had not been for him I should have neglected my cloak business beyond repair. He handled me as a gambler"s wife does her husband. He would seek me out in front of some unfinished building, at Tevkin"s, or at some "boom" cafe, and make me sign some checks, consult me on something or other, or wheedle me into accompanying him to my factory for an hour or two. But the next day he would have to go hunting for me again