The Rise of David Levinsky (39 page)

The press supported the strikers. It did so, not because they were working-people, but because they were East-Siders. Their district was the great field of activity for the American University Settlement worker and fashionable slummer. The East Side was a place upon which one descended in quest of esoteric types and “local color,” as well as for purposes of philanthropy and “uplift” work. To spend an evening in some East Side café was regarded as something like spending a few hours at the Louvre; so much so that one such café, in the depth of East Houston Street, was making a fortune by purveying expensive wine dinners to people from up-town who came there ostensibly to see “how the other half lived,” but who only saw one another eat and drink in freedom from the restraint of manners. Accordingly, to show sympathy for East Side strikers was within the bounds of the highest propriety. 284 It was as “correct” as belonging to the Episcopal Church. And so public opinion was wholly on the side of the Cloak-makers’ Union. This hastened the end. We succumbed. A settlement was patched up. We were beaten. But even this did not appease the men. They repudiated the agreement between their organization and ours, branding it as a trap, and the strike was continued. Then the manufacturers yielded completely, acceding to every demand of the union.

I became busy. I continued to curse the union, but at the bottom of my heart I wished it well, for the vigor with which it enforced its increased wage scale in all larger factories gave me greater advantages than ever. I was still able to get men who were willing to trick the organization. Every Friday afternoon these men received pay-envelopes which bore figures in strict conformity with the union’s schedule, but the contents of which were considerably below the sum marked outside. Subsequently this proved to be a risky practice to pursue, for the walking delegates were wide awake and apt to examine the envelopes as the operatives were emerging from the shop. Accordingly, I adopted another system: the men would receive the union pay in full, but on the following Monday each of them would pay me back the difference between the official and the actual wage. The usual practice was for the employee to put the few dollars into his little wage-book, which he would then place on my desk for the ostensible purpose of having his account verified.

By thus cheating the union I could now undersell the bigger manufacturers more easily than I had been able to do previous to the lockout and strike. I had more orders than I could fill. Money was coming in in floods.

The lockout and the absolute triumph of the union was practically the making of me.

 

I saw much less of Dora than I had done during the five months of the lockout, and our happiness when we managed to be left alone was all the keener for it. Our best time for a tête-à-tête were the hours between 10 and 12 on the evenings, when Max was sure to be away at his dancing-schools, but then it often happened that those were among my busiest hours at the shop. Sometimes I would 285 snatch half an hour from my work in the middle of a busy day to surprise her with my caresses. If a week passed without my doing so she would punish me with mute scenes of jealousy, of which none but she and I were aware. She would avoid looking at me, and I would press my hand to my heart and raise a pleading gaze at her, which said:

“ I couldn’t get away, dearest. Honest, I couldn’t.”

One evening I bought her some roses. As I carried them home I was thrilled as much by the fact that I, David of Abner’s Court, was taking flowers to a lady as I was by visioning the moment when I should hand them to Dora. When I came home and put my offering into her hand she was in a flurry of delight over it, but she was scared to death lest it should betray our secret. After giving way to bursts of admiration for the flowers and myself, and smelling her fill, and covering me with kisses, she burned the bouquet in the stove and forbade me to use this method of showing her attention again.

“Your dear eyes are the best flowers you can bring me,” she said.

Her love burned with a steady flame, bright and even. It manifested itself in a thousand little things which she did for the double purpose of ministering to my comfort and keeping me in mind of herself. I felt it in the taste of the coffee I drank, in the quality of my cup and saucer, in the painstaking darning on my socks, in the frequency with which my room was swept, my towel changed, my books dusted.

“Did you notice the new soap-dish on your wash-stand?” she asked me, one morning. “Do you deserve it? Do you know how often I am in your room every day? Just guess.”

“A million times a day.”

“To you it’s a joke. But if you loved as I do you would not be up to joking.”

“Very well, I’ll cry.” And I personated a boy crying.

“Don’t. It breaks my heart,” she said, earnestly. “I can’t see you crying even for fun.” She kissed my eyes. “No, really, I go to your room twenty times a day, perhaps. When I am there it seems to me that I am nearer to you. I kiss the pillow on which you sleep. I pat the blanket, the pitcher, every book of yours—everything your dear little hands touch. I want you to know it. I want you to know how I love you. I knew that love was sweet, but I never knew that it was so sweet. Oh, my loved one!”

She would pour out all sorts of endearments on me, some of them rather of a fantastic nature, but “my loved one” became her favorite appellation, while I found special relish in calling her “my bride” or “bridie mine.”

I can almost feel her white fingers as they played with my abundant dark hair or rested on my shoulders while she looked into my eyes and murmured, yearningly: “My loved one! My loved one! My loved one!”

The set of my shoulders was a special object of her admiration. She would shake them tenderly, call me monkey, and ask me if I realized how much she loved me and if I deserved it all, bad boy that I was.

She held me in check with an iron hand. Whenever my caresses threatened to overstep the bounds of what she termed “respectable love” she would stop them. With clouded eyes she would slap my hand and then kiss it, saying:

“Be a gentleman, Levinsky. Be a gentleman. Can’t you be a gentleman?”

“Oh, you don’t love me,” I would grunt.

“I don’t? I don’t? I wish you would love me half as much,” with a sigh. “If you did you would not behave the way you do. That’s all your love amounts to—behaving like that. All men are hogs, after all.” With which she would take to lecturing me and pouring out her infatuated heart in that solemn singsong of hers, which somewhat bored me.

If she thought my kisses unduly passionate and the amorous look of my eye dangerous she would move away from me.

“Don’t be angry at me, sweetheart,” she would say, cooingly.

“I am not angry, but you don’t love me.”

“Why should you hurt my feelings like that? Why should you shed my blood? Am I not yours, heart and soul? Am I not ready to cut myself to pieces to please you? Why should you torture me?”

“What are you afraid of? He won’t know any more than he does now,” I once urged.

She blushed, looking at the floor. After a minute’s silence she said, dolefully:

“It isn’t so much on account of that as on account of the children. How could I look Lucy in the face?”

Her eyes grew humid. My heart went out to her.

“ I understand. You are right,” I yielded.

The scene repeated itself not many days after. It occurred again and again at almost regular intervals. She fought bravely.

Many months passed, and still she was able “to look Lucy in the face.”

At first, for a period of six or seven weeks, my moral conduct outside the house was immaculate. Then I renewed my excursions to certain streets. I made rather frequent calls at the apartment of a handsome Hungarian woman who called herself Cleo. Once, in a frenzy, I tried to imagine that she was Dora, and then I experienced qualms of abject compunction and self-loathing.

Sometimes Lucy would arouse my jealous rancor, as a living barrier between her mother and myself. But she was really dear to me. I revered Dora for her fortitude, and Lucy appealed to me as the embodiment of her mother’s saintliness.

I would watch Lucy. She was an interesting study. Her manner of speaking, her giggle, her childish little affectations seemed to grow more American every day. She was like a little foreigner in the house.

Dora was watching and studying her with a feeling akin to despair, I thought. It was as though she was pursuing the little girl, with outstretched arms, vainly trying to overtake her.

I
WAS rapidly advancing on the road to financial triumphs. I was planning to move my business to larger quarters, in the same modest neighborhood. Mrs. Chaikin, my partner’s wife, failed to realize the situation, however. She could not forgive me the false representations I had made to her regarding my assets.

“And where is the treasure you were expecting?” she would twit me. “You never tell a lie, do you? You simply don’t know how to do it. Poor thing!”

When we were in the midst of an avalanche of lucrative orders promising a brilliant winter season she took it into her head to withdraw her husband from the firm, in which he was a silent partner. Her decision was apparently based on the extreme efforts she had once seen me making to raise five hundred dollars. As a matter of fact, this was due to the rapidity of our growth. I lacked capital. But then my credit was growing, too, and altogether things were in a most encouraging condition.

“What is the use worrying along like that?” she said. “You deceived me from the start. You made me believe you had a lot of money, while you were really a beggar. Yes, you are a beggar, and a beggar you are bound to stay. A beggar and a swindler—that’s what you are. You have fooled me long enough. You can’t fool me any longer. So there!”

Her husband was still employed by the German firm, attending to the needs of our growing little factory surreptitiously every evening and on Sundays. The day seemed near when it would pay him to give all his time to our shop. And he was aware of it, too; to some extent, at least. But Mrs. Chaikin ordained otherwise.

I attempted to present the actual state of affairs to her, but broke off in the middle of a sentence. It suddenly 289 flashed upon my mind that it might all be to my advantage. “A designer can be hired,” I said to myself. “The business is progressing rapidly. To make him my life partner is too high a price to pay for his skill. Besides, having him for a partner actually means having his nuisance of a wife for a partner. It will be a good thing to get rid of her.”

I consulted Max, as I did quite often now. Not that I thought myself in need of his advice, or anybody else‘s, for that matter. Success had made me too self-confident for that. I played the intimate and ardent friend, and this was simply part of my personation. To flatter his vanity I would make him think his suggestions had been acted upon and that they had brought good results. As a consequence, he was developing the notion that my success was largely due to his guidance, a notion which jarred on me, but which I humored, nevertheless.

“Do you know what’s the matter?” he said, sagely. “Mrs. Chaikin must have found another partner for her husband. Some fellow with big money, I suppose.”

“You are right, Max,” I said, sincerely. “How stupid I am.”

“Why, of course they have got another partner. Of course they have,” he repeated, with elation. “So much the better for you. Let them go to the eighty black years. Don’t run after him. Just do as I tell you and you’ll be all right, Levinsky. My advice has never got you in trouble, has it?”

“ Indeed not. Indeed not,” I answered.

 

Max’s blindness to what was going on between Dora and myself was a riddle to which I vainly sought a solution. That this cynic who charged every man and woman with immorality should, in the circumstances, be so absolutely undisturbed in his confidence regarding his wife seemed nothing short of a miracle. When I now think of the riddle I see its solution in a modified version of the old rule concerning the mote in thy neighbor’s eye and the beam in thine own eye. Your worst pessimist is, after all, an optimist with regard to himself. We are quick to recognize the gravity of ill health in somebody else, yet we ourselves may be on the very brink of death without realizing it. It is a special phase of selfishness. We are loath to connect the idea of a catastrophe with our own person. Max, who saw a mote in the eye of everybody else’s wife, failed to perceive the beam in the eye of his own.

As for Sadie, who lived in the same house now, and who visited Dora’s apartment at all hours, she was too silly and too deeply infatuated with her friend to suspect her of anything wrong.

I idolized Dora. It seemed to me that I adored her soul even more than I did her body. I was under her moral influence, and the firmness with which she maintained the distance between us added to my respect for her. And yet I never ceased to dream of and to seek her moral downfall.

 

 

I had extended my canvassing activities to a number of cities outside New York, my territory being a semicircle with a radius of about a hundred and fifty miles. I had long since picked up some of the business jargon of the country and I was thirstily drinking in more and more.

“What do you think of this number, Mr. So-and-so?” I would say, self-consciously, to a merchant, as I dangled a garment in front of him. “ You can make a run on it. It’s the kind of suit that gives the wearer an air of distinction.”

If I heard a bit of business rhetoric that I thought effective I would jot it down and commit it to memory. In like manner I would write down every new piece of slang, the use of the latest popular phrase being, as I thought, helpful in making oneself popular with Americans, especially with those of the young generation. But somehow a slang phrase would be in general use for a considerable time before it attracted my attention. The Americans I met were so quick to discern and adopt these phrases it seemed as if they were born with a special slang sense which I, poor foreigner that I was, lacked. That I was not born in America was something like a physical defect that asserted itself in many disagreeable ways—a physical defect which, alas! no surgeon in the world was capable of removing.