The Rise of David Levinsky (50 page)

“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 merchants. 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 competition on our part, till he worked himself into a passion 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.

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 passion 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 sex, 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 reasserted 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 circumstances 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 basement 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 passage 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 378 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 antithesis of anarchism, socialism, trade-unionism, strikes.

I was a convinced free-thinker. Spencer’s Unknowable had irrevocably replaced my God. Yet religion now appealed to me as an indispensable instrument in the great orchestra of things. From what I had seen of the world, or read about it in the daily press, I was convinced that but few people of wealth and power had real religion in their hearts. I felt sure that most of them looked upon churches or synagogues as they did upon police-courts; that they valued them primarily as safeguards of law and order and correctness, and this had become my attitude. For the rest, I felt that a vast number of the people who professed Christianity or Judaism did so merely because to declare oneself an atheist was not a prudent thing to do from a business or social point of view, or that they were in doubt and chose to be on the safe side of it, lest there should be a God, “after all,” while millions of other people were not interested enough even to doubt, or to ask questions, and were content to do as everybody did. But there were some who did ask questions and did dare to declare themselves atheists. I was one of these, and yet I looked upon religion as a most important institution, and was willing to contribute to its support.

My business life had fostered the conviction in me that, outside of the family, the human world was as brutally selfish as the jungle, and that it was worm-eaten with hypocrisy into the bargain. From time to time the newspapers published sensational revelations concerning some pillar of society who had turned out to be a common thief on an uncommon scale. I saw that political speeches, sermons, and editorials had, with very few exceptions, no more sincerity in them than the rhetoric of an advertisement. I saw that Americans who boasted descent from the heroes of the Revolution boasted, in the same breath, of having spent an evening with Lord So-and-so; that it was their avowed ambition to acquire for their daughters the very titles which their ancestors had fought to banish from the life of their country. I saw that civilization was honeycombed with what Max Nordau called conventional lies, with sham ecstasy, sham sympathy, sham smiles, sham laughter.

The riot of prosperity introduced the fashion of respectable women covering their faces with powder and paint in a way that had hitherto been peculiar to women of the streets, so I pictured civilization as a harlot with cheeks, lips, and eyelashes of artificial beauty. I imagined mountains of powder and paint, a deafening chorus of affected laughter, a huge heart, as large as a city, full of falsehood and mischief.

The leaders of the Jewish socialists, who were also at the head of the Jewish labor movement, seemed to me to be the most repulsive hypocrites of all. I loathed them.

I had no creed. I knew of no ideals. The only thing I believed in was the cold, drab theory of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. This could not satisfy a heart that was hungry for enthusiasm and affection, so dreams of family life became my religion. Self-sacrificing devotion to one’s family was the only kind of altruism and idealism I did not flout.

I was worth over a million, and my profits had reached enormous dimensions, so I was regarded a most desirable 380 match, and match-makers pestered me as much as I would let them, but they found me a hard man to suit.

 

There was a homesick young man in my shop, a native of Antomir, with whom I often chatted of our common birthplace. His name was Mirmelstein. He was a little fellow with a massive head and a neck that seemed to be too slender to support it. I liked his face for its honest, ingenuous expression, but more especially because I thought his eyes had a homesick look in them. He was a poor mechanic, but I found him a steady job in my shipping department.

He could furnish me no information about Reb Sender, of whom he had never heard before; he knew of the Minsker family, of course, and he told me that Shiphrah, Matilda’s mother, was dead; that Yeffim, Matilda’s brother, had been sent to Siberia some three years before for complicity in the revolutionary movement, and that Matilda herself had had a hair-breadth escape from arrest and was living in Switzerland.

He wrote to Antomir, and a few weeks later he brought me the sad information that Reb Sender had been dead for several years, and that his wife had married again.

O
NE day in November less than six months after I had learned of Yeffim Minsker’s arrest and of Matilda’s escape, as I was making the rounds of my several departments, little Mirmelstein accosted me timidly.

“Yeffim Minsker and his sister are here,” he said, with the smile of one breaking an interesting surprise.