The Rise of David Levinsky (13 page)

At about 4 o’clock in the afternoon I was alone in the drawing-room. I stood at the piano—the first I had ever laid eyes on—timidly sounding some of the keys, when I heard approaching voices. With my heart in my mouth, I rushed over to the nearest window, where I paused, feigning interest in some passing peasant teams. Presently Matilda made her appearance. accompanied by two girl friends.

The three young women were chattering in Russian, a language of which I understood scarcely three dozen words. I could conjecture, however, that the subject of their talk was no other than my own quailing personality.

Suddenly Matilda addressed herself to me in Yiddish: “Look here, young man! Don’t you know it is bad manners for a gentleman to stand with his back to ladies?”

I faced about, all flushed and scared.

“That’s better,” she said, gaily. “Never mind staring at the floor. Give us a look, will you? Don’t act as a shy bridegroom.”

I made no answer. The room seemed to be in a whirl.

“Why don’t you speak?” Matilda insisted, concealing her quizzical purpose under a well-acted air of gravity.

Her two friends roared, and, spurred on by their merriment, she continued to make game of me.

“Won’t you give us one look, at least? Do, please! Come, my mother will never find out you have been guilty of a great sin like that.”

I was dying to get up and fling out of the room, but I felt glued to the spot. Their cruel sport, which made me faint with embarrassment and misery, had something inexpressibly alluring in it.

One of the two girls said something in Russian of which I caught the word “kiss” and which was greeted by a new outburst of laughter. I was terror-stricken.

“Well, pious Jew!” Matilda resumed. “Suppose a girl were to give you a kiss. What would you do? Commit suicide, would you? Well, never fear; we won’t be as cruel as all that. I tell you what, though. I’ll hide your side-locks behind your ears. I just want to see how you would look without them.” At this she stepped up close to me and reached out her hands for my two appendages.

I pushed her off. “Please, let me alone,” I protested.

“At last we have heard his voice. Bravo! We’re making headway, aren’t we?”

At this point her mother’s angry voice made itself heard. Matilda desisted, with a merry remark to her friends.

 

The next morning when she and I were alone she tantalized me again. She made another attempt to tuck my side-locks behind my ears. As we were alone I had more courage.

“If you don’t stop I’ll go away from here,” I said, in a rage. “What do you want of me?”

As I thus gave vent to my resentment I instinctively felt that, so far from causing her to avoid me, it would quicken her rompish interest in me. And I hoped it would.

“ ’S-sh! don’t yell,” she said, startled. “Can’t you take a joke?”

“A nice joke, that.”

“Very well, I won’t do it again. I didn’t know you were a touch-me-not.” After a pause she resumed, in grave, friendly accents: “Come, don’t be angry. I want to talk to you. Look here. Is there any sense in your wasting your life the way you do? Look at the way you are dressed, the way you live generally. Besides, the idea of a young man like you not being able to speak a word of Russian! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Why, mother says you are remarkably bright. Isn’t it a pity that you should throw it all away? Why don’t you try to study Russian, geography, history? Why don’t you try to become an educated man?”

“The idea!” I said, with a laugh.

My confusion was gone, partly, at least. I looked her full in the face.

She flared up. “The idea!” she mocked me. “Rather say, ‘The idea of a bright young fellow being so ignorant!’ Did you ever hear of a provoking thing like that?”

There was a good deal of her mother’s helter-skelter explosiveness in her.

Now, that I had scanned her features in the light of the fact that she was a married woman, I read that fact into them. She did look married, I remarked to myself. Her exposed hair gave her an effect of “aristocratic” wickedness and wantonness which repelled and drew me at once. She was a girl, and yet she was a married woman. This duality of hers deepened the fascinating mystery of the distance between us.

She proceeded to draw me out. She made me tell her the story of my young life, and I obeyed her but too willingly. I told her my whole tale of woe, reveling in my own rehearsal of my sufferings and more especially in the expressions of horror and heartfelt pity which it elicited from her.

“My God! My God!” she cried, gasping and wringing her hands. “Poor boy!” or, “Oh, I can’t hear It! I can’t hear it! It is enough to drive one crazy.”

At one point, as I described the pangs of hunger which I had often borne, there were tears in her interesting eyes.

When I had finished my story, flushed with a sense of my histrionic success, she ordered tea and preserves, as though to indemnify me for my past sufferings.

“All the more reason for you to study Russian and to become an educated man,” she said, as she put sugar into my glass. She cited the cases of former Talmudists, poor and friendless like myself, who had studied at the universities, fighting every inch of their way, till they had achieved success as physicians, lawyers, writers. She spoke passionately, often with the absurd acerbity of her mother. “It’s a crime for a young man like you to throw himself away on that idiotic Talmud of yours,” she said, pacing up and down the room fiercely.

All this sounded shockingly wicked, and yet it did not shock me in the least.

“I have a plan,” I said.

When she heard what I wanted to do she shook her head and frowned. She said, in substance, that America was a land of dollars, not of education, and that she wanted me to be an educated man. I assured her that I should study English in America and, after I had laid up some money, prepare for college there (she could have made me promise anything). But colleges in which the instruction was not in Russian failed to appeal to her imagination.

Still, when she saw that my heart was set on the project, she yielded. She seemed to like the fervor with which I defended my cause, and the notion of my going to a far-away land was apparently beginning to have its effect. I was the hero of an adventure. Gradually she became quite enthusiastic about my plan.

“I tell you what. I can raise the money for you,” she said, with a gesture of sudden resolution. “How much is it?”

When I said, forlornly, that it would come to about eighty rubles, she declared, gravely:

“That’s all right. I shall get it for you. Only, say nothing to mother about it.”

I thought myself in a flurry of joy over this windfall, but a little later, when I was left to myself, I became aware that the flurry I was in was of quite a different nature. When I tried to think of America I found that my ambition in that direction had lost its former vitality.

I was deeply in love with Matilda.

S
HE continued to treat me in a patronizing, playful way; but we were supposed to be great friends and I asked myself no questions.

“The money is assured,” she once announced. “You shall get it in a few days. You may begin to pack your great baggage,” she jested.

My heart sank within me, but I feigned exultation.

“ Do you deserve it, pious soul that you are?” she laughed. And casting a glance at my side-locks, she added: “I do wish you would cut off those horrid things of yours. You won’t take them to America, will you?”

I smiled. Small as was my stock of information of the New World, I knew enough of it to understand, in a general way, that side-locks were out of place there.

She proceeded to put my side-locks behind my ears, and this time I did not object. She then smoothed them down, the touch of her fingers thrilling me through and through. Then she brought a hand-glass and made me look at myself.

“Do you see the difference?” she demanded. “If you were not rigged out like the savage that you are you wouldn’t be a bad-looking fellow, after all. Why, girls might even fall in love with you. But then what does a pious soul like you know about such things as love?”

“How do you know I don’t?” I ventured to say, blushing like a poppy.

“Do you, really?” she said, with mischievous surprise.

I nodded.

“Well, well. So you are not quite so saintly as I thought you were! Perhaps you have even been in love yourself? Have you? Tell me.”

I kept silent. My heart was throbbing wildly.

“Do you love me?”

I nodded once more. My heart stood still.

“Kiss me, then.”

She put my arms around her, made me clasp her to my breast, and we kissed, passionately.

I suddenly felt ten years older.

She broke away from me, jumping around, slapping her hands and bubbling over with triumphant mirth, as she shouted: “There is a pious soul for you! There is a pious soul for you!”

A thought of little Red Esther of my childhood days flashed through my brain, of the way she would force me to “sin” and then gloat over my “fall.”

“A penny for your piety,” Matilda added, gravely. “When you are in America you’ll dress like a Gentile and even shave. Then you won’t look so ridiculous. Good clothes would make another man of you.” At this she looked me over in a business-like sort of way. “Pretty good figure, that,” she concluded.

In the evening of that day, when there was company in the house, she bore herself as though she did not know me. But the next morning, after the children had gone to school and her mother was away on her various missions, she made me put on the glittering coat and cap of her brother’s Sunday uniform.

“It’s rather too small for you, but it’s becoming all the same,” she said, enthusiastically. “If mamma came in now she would not know you. But then there would be a nice how-do-you-do if she did.” She gave a titter which rolled through my very heart. “Well, Mr.
Gymnasist,
^a
are you really in love with me?”

“Don’t make fun of me, pray,” I implored her. “It hurts, you know.”

“Very well, I sha’n’t. But you haven’t answered my question.”

“What question?”

“What a poor memory you have! And yet mother says you have a good head.’ Try to remember.”

“I do remember your question.”

“Then what is your answer?”

“Yes.”

“Yes!” she mocked me. “That’s not the way gentlemen declare their love.”

“What else shall I say?”

“What else! Well,say: ‘I am ready to die for you. You are the sunshine of my life.”’

“‘You are the sunshine of my life,’ ” I echoed, with a smile that was a combination of mirth and resentment.

“‘You are my happiness, my soul. The world would be dark without you.”’

“I am no baby to parrot somebody else’s words.”

“Then you don’t love me.”

“Yes, I do. But I hate to be made fun of. Don‘t! Please don’t!” I said it with a beseeching, passionate tremor in my voice, and all at once I clasped her violently to me and was about to kiss her. She put up her lips e-sponsively, but suddenly she wrenched herself back.

“Easy, easy, you saintly Talmudist,” she said, good-naturedly. “You must not forget that you are not a gymnasist, that to kiss a woman is a sin, a great sin. You’ll be beaten with rods of iron in the world to come. Well, good-by,” she concluded, gravely. “I must go. Take off that coat and cap. Mamma may come in at any moment.” She showed me where to hang them.

I
N my incessant reveries of her I developed the theory that if I abandoned my plan about going to America she would have her father send me to college with a view to my marrying her. Indeed, matches of this kind were not an unusual arrangement in our town (nor are they in the Jewish districts of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago, for example).

My bed was usually-made on the enormous green sofa in the spacious sitting-room. One night, when I was asleep on that great sofa, I was suddenly aroused by the touch of a hand.

“ ‘S-sh,” I heard Matilda’s whisper. “ I want to talk to you. I can’t sleep, anyhow. I don’t know why. So I was thinking of all kinds of things till I came to your plan about America. It is foolish. Why go so far? Perhaps something can be done to get you into high school and then into the university.”

“I have guessed it right, then,” I exclaimed within myself. The room was pitch-dark. Her white kimono was all I could see of her.

She explained certain details. She spoke in a very low undertone, with great earnestness. I took her by the hand and drew her down to a seat on the edge of the sofa beside me. She offered no resistance. She continued to talk, partly in the same undertone, partly in whispers, with her hand remaining in mine. I was aflame with happiness, yet I listened intently. I felt sure that she was my bride-to-be, that it was only a matter of days when our engagement would be celebrated. My heart went out to her with a passion that seemed to be sanctioned by God and men. I strained down her head and kissed her, but that was the stainless kiss of a man yearning upon the lips of his betrothed. I clasped her flimsily garmented form, kissed her again and again, let her kiss and bite me; and still it all seemed legitimate, or nearly so. I saw in it an emphatic confirmation of my feeling that she did not regard herself a stranger to me. That mattered more than anything else at this moment.

“You’re a devil,” she whispered, slapping me on both cheeks, “a devil with side-locks.” And she broke into a suppressed laugh.

“I’ll study as hard as I can,” I assured her, with boyish exultation. “You’ll see what I can do. The Gentile books are child’s play in comparison with the Talmud.”

I went into details. She took no part in my talk, but she let me go on. I became so absorbed in what I was saying that my caresses ceased. I sat up and spoke quite audibly.