The Rise of David Levinsky (51 page)

I paused, flushing. I feigned indifference and preoccupation, but the next moment I cast off all pretense.

“Are they really?” I asked.

He produced a clipping from a socialist Yiddish daily containing an advertisement of a public meeting to be held at Cooper Institute under the auspices of an organization of Russian revolutionists for the purpose of welcoming Yeffim and another man, a Doctor Gorsky, both of whom had recently escaped from Siberia. The revolutionary movement was then at its height in Russia, and the Jews were among its foremost and bravest leaders (which, by the way, accounts for the anti-Jewish riots and massacres which the Government inspired and encouraged quite openly). As was mentioned in an early chapter of this book, the then Minister of the Interior was the same man who had been Director of Police over the whole empire at the time of the anti-Jewish riots which followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II. in 1881, and which started the great emigration of Jews to America. From time to time some distinguished revolutionist would be sent to America for subscriptions to the cause. This was the mission of Doctor Gorsky and Yeffim. They were here, not as immigrants, but merely to raise funds for the movement at home.

As for Matilda, it appeared that Doctor Gorsky was her husband. Whether he had married her in Russia, before his arrest, or in Switzerland, where he and her brother had 382 spent some time after their escape from exile, Mirmelstein could not tell me. Matilda’s name was not mentioned in the advertisement, but my shipping-clerk had heard of her arrival and marriage from some Antomir people.

I could scarcely do anything that day. I was in a fever of excitement. “Do I still love her?” I wondered.

I made up my mind to attend the Cooper Institute meeting. It was a bold venture, for the crowd was sure to contain some socialist cloak-makers who held me in anything but esteem. But then I had not had a strike in my shop for several years, and it did not seem likely that they would offer me an insult. Anyhow, the temptation to see Matilda was too strong. I had to go. She was certain to be on the platform, and all I wanted was to take a look at her from the auditorium. “And who knows but I may have a chance to speak to her, too,” I thought.

It was a cold evening in the latter part of November. I went to the meeting in my expensive fur coat (although fur coats were still a rare spectacle in the streets), with a secret foretaste of the impression my prosperity would make upon Matilda. It was a fatal mistake.

It was twenty minutes to 8 when I reached the front door of the historical meeting-hall, but it was already crowded to overflowing, and the policemen guarding the brightly illuminated entrance turned me away with a crowd of others. I was in despair. I tried again, and this time, apparently owing to my mink coat, I was admitted. Every seat in the vast underground auditorium was occupied. But few people were allowed to stand, in the rear of the hall, and I was one of them. From the chat I overheard around me I gathered that there were scores of men and women in the audience who had been in the thick of sensational conflicts in the great crusade for liberty that was then going on in Russia. I questioned a man who stood beside me about Doctor Gorsky, and from his answers I gained the impression that Matilda’s husband was considered one of the pluckiest men in the struggle. At the time of his arrest he was practising medicine.

Ranged on the platform on either side of the speaker’s desk were about a hundred chairs, several of which in the two front rows were kept vacant. Presently there was a stir on the platform. A group of men and women made 383 their appearance and seated themselves on the unoccupied chairs. They were greeted with passionate cheers and applause.

One of them was Matilda. I recognized her at once. Her curly brown hair was gray at the temples, and her oval little face was somewhat bloated, and she was stouter than she had been twenty-one years before; but all this was merely like a new dress. Had I met her in the street, I might have merely felt that she looked familiar to me, without being able to trace her. As it was, she was strikingly the same as I had known her, though not precisely the same as I had pictured her, of late years, at least. Some errors had stolen into my image of her, and now, that I saw her in the flesh, I recalled her likeness of twenty-one years before, and she now looked precisely as she had done then. She was as interesting as ever. I was in such a turmoil that I scarcely knew what was happening on the platform. Did I still love her, or was it merely the excitement of beholding a living memory of my youth? One thing was certain—the feeling of reverence and awe with which I had once been wont to view her and her parents was stirring in my heart again. For the moment I did not seem to be the man who owned a big cloak-factory and was worth over a million American dollars.

The chairman had been speaking for some time before I became aware of his existence. As his address was in Russian and I had long since unlearned what little I had ever known of that language, his words were Greek to me.

Matilda was flanked by two men, both with full beards, one fair and the other rather dark. The one of the fair complexion and beard was Yeffim, although I recognized him by his resemblance to Matilda and more especially to her father, rather than by his image of twenty-one years ago. I supposed that the man on the other side of her, the one with the dark beard, was her husband, and I asked the man by my side about it, but he did not know.

Several speakers made brief addresses of welcome. One of these spoke in Yiddish and one in English, so I understood them. They dealt with the revolution and the anti-Semitic atrocities, and paid glowing tributes to the new-comers. They were interrupted by outburst after outburst of enthusiasm and indignation. When finally Doctor Gorsky 384 was introduced (it was the man with the dark beard) there was a veritable pandemonium of applause, cheers, and ejaculations that lasted many minutes. He spoke in Russian and he seemed to be a poor speaker. I searched his face for evidence of valor and strength, but did not seem to find any. I thought it was rather a weak face—weak and kindly and girlish-looking. His beard, which was long and thin, did not become him. I asked myself whether I was jealous of him, and the question seemed so incongruous, so remote. He made a good impression on me. The fact that this man, who was possessed of indomitable courage, had a weak, good-natured face interested me greatly, and the fact that he had gone through much suffering made a strong appeal to my sympathies (somehow his martyrdom was linked in my mind to his futility as a speaker). I warmed to him.

He was followed by Yeffim, and the scene of wild enthusiasm was repeated.

When Minsker had finished the chairman declared the meeting closed. There was a rush for the platform. It was quite high above the auditorium floor; unless one reached it by way of the committee-room, which was a considerable distance to the right, it had to be mounted, not without an effort, by means of the chairs in the press inclosure. After some hesitation I made a dash for one of these chairs, and the next minute I was within three or four feet from Matilda, but with an excited crowd between us. Everybody wanted to shake hands with the heroes. The jam and scramble were so great that Doctor Gorsky, Yeffim, and Matilda had to extricate themselves and to escape into the spacious committee-room in the rear of the platform.

Some minutes later I stood by her side in that room, amid a cluster of revolutionists, her husband and Yeffim being each the center of another crowd in the same room.

“I beg your pardon,” I began, with a sheepish smile. “Do you know me?”

Her glittering brown eyes fixed me with a curious look.

“My name is David Levinsky,” I added. “ ‘Dovid,’ the Talmudic student to whom you gave money with which to go to America.”

“Of course I know you,” she snapped, taking stock of my 385 mink overcoat. “And I have heard about you, too. You have a lot of money, haven’t you? I see you are wearing a costly fur coat.” And she brutally turned to speak to somebody else.

My heart stood still. I wanted to say something, to assure her that I was not so black as the socialists painted me. I had an impulse to offer her a generous contribution to the cause, but I had not the courage to open my mouth again. The bystanders were eying me with glances that seemed to say, “The idea of a fellow like this being here!” I was a despicable
“bourgeois,”
a “capitalist” of the kind whose presence at a socialist meeting was a sacrilege.

I slunk out of the room feeling like a whipped cur. “Why, she is a perfect savage!” I thought. “But then what else can you expect of a socialist?”

I thought of the scenes that had passed between her and myself in her mother’s house and I sneered. “A socialist, a good, pure soul, indeed!” I mused, gloatingly. “That’s exactly like them. A bunch of hypocrites, that’s all they are.”

At the same time I was nagging myself for having had so little sense as to sport my prosperity before a socialist, of all the people in the world.

A few days later the episode seemed to have occurred many years before. It did not bother me. Nor did Matilda.

I
T was an afternoon in April. My chief bookkeeper, one of my stenographers, Bender, and myself were hard at work at my Broadway factory amid a muffled turmoil of industry. There were important questions of credit to dispose of and letters to answer. I was taking up account after account, weighing my data with the utmost care, giving every detail my closest attention. And all the while I was thus absorbed, seemingly obilvious to everything else, I was alive to the fact that it was Passover and the eve of the anniversary of my mother’s death; that three or four hours later I should be solemnizing her memorial day at the new Synagogue of the Sons of Antomir; that while there I should sit next to Mr. Kaplan, a venerable-looking man to whose daughter I had recently become engaged, and that after the service I was to accompany Mr. Kaplan to his house and spend the evening in the bosom of his family, by the side of the girl that was soon to become my wife. My consciousness of all this grew keener every minute, till it began to interfere with my work. I was getting fidgety. Finally I broke off in the middle of a sentence.

I washed myself, combed my plentiful crop of dark hair, carefully brushed myself, and put on my spring overcoat and derby hat—both of a dark-brown hue.

“I sha’n’t be back until the day after to-morrow,” I announced to Bender, after giving him some orders.

“Till day after to-morrow!” he said, with reproachful amazement.

I nodded.

“Can’t you put it off? This is no time for being away,” he grumbled.

“It can’t be helped.”

“You’re not going out of town, are you?”

“What difference does it make?” After a pause I added: “It isn’t on business. It’s a private matter.”

“Oh!” he uttered, with evident relief. Nothing hurt his pride more than to suspect me of having business secrets from him.

He was a married man now, having, less than a year ago, wedded a sweet little girl, a cousin, who was as simple-hearted and simple-minded as himself, and to whom he had practically been engaged since boyhood. His salary was one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week now. I was at home in their well-ordered little establishment, the sunshine that filled it having given an added impulse to my matrimonial aspirations.

I betook myself to the new Antomir Synagogue. The congregation had greatly grown in prosperity and had recently moved from the ramshackle little frame building that had been its home into an impressive granite structure, formerly a Presbyterian church. This was my first visit to the building. Indeed, I had not seen the inside of its predecessor, the little old house of prayer that had borne the name of my native town, years before it was abandoned. In former years, even some time after I had become a convinced free-thinker, I had visited it at least twice a year—on my two memorial days—that is, on the anniversaries of the death of my parents. I had not done so since I had read Spencer. This time, however, the anniversary of my mother’s death had a peculiar meaning for me. Vaguely as a result of my new mood, and distinctly as a result of my betrothal, I was lured to the synagogue by a force against which my Spencerian agnosticism was powerless.

I found the interior of the building brilliantly illuminated. The woodwork of the “stand” and the bible platform, the velvet-and-gold curtains of the Holy Ark, and the fresco paintings on the walls and ceiling were screamingly new and gaudy. So were the ornamental electric fixtures. Altogether the place reminded me of a reformed German synagogue rather than of the kind with which my idea of Judaism had always been identified. This seemed to accentuate the fact that the building had until recently been a Christian church. The glaring electric lights and the glittering decorations struck me as something unholy. Still, the scattered handful of worshipers I found there, and more particularly the beadle, looked orthodox enough, and I gradually became reconciled to the place as a house of God.

The beadle was a new incumbent. Better dressed and with more authority in his appearance than the man who had superintended the old place, he comported well with the look of things in the new synagogue. After obsequiously directing me to the pew of my prospective father-in-law, who had not yet arrived, he inserted a stout, tall candle into one of the sockets of the “stand” and lit it. It was mine. It was to burn uninterruptedly for my mother’s soul for the next twenty-four hours. Mr. Kaplan’s pew was in a place of honor—that is, by the east wall, near the Holy Ark. To see my memorial candle I had to take a few steps back. I did so, and as I watched its flame memories and images took possession of me that turned my present life into a dream and my Russian past into reality. According to the Talmud there is a close affinity between the human soul and light, for “the spirit of man is the lamp of God,” as Solomon puts it in his Parables. Hence the custom of lighting candles or lamps for the dead. And so, as I gazed at that huge candle commemorating the day when my mother gave her life for me, I felt as though its light was part of her spirit. The gentle flutter of its flame seemed to be speaking in the sacred whisper of a grave-yard.