The Rise of David Levinsky (27 page)

A
N unimportant accident, a mere trifle, suddenly gave a new turn to the trend of events changing the character of my whole life.

It was the middle of April. The spring season was over, but Manheimer Brothers, the firm by which I was employed, had received heavy duplicate orders for silk coats, and, considering the time of the year, we were unusually busy. One day, at the lunch hour, as I was opening a small bottle of milk, the bottle slipped out of my hand and its contents were spilled over the floor and some silk coats.

Jeff Manheimer, one of the twins, happened to be near me at the moment, and a disagreeable scene followed. But first a word or two about Jeff Manheimer.

He was the “inside man” of the firm, having charge of the mechanical end of the business as well as of the offices. He was of German parentage, but of American birth. Bald-headed as a melon and with a tendency to corpulence, he had the back of a man of forty-five and the front of a man of twenty-five. He was a vivacious fellow, one of those who are indefatigable in abortive attempts at being witty, one of his favorite puns being that we “Russians were not rushin’ at all,” that we were a “slow lot.” Altogether he treated us as an inferior race, often lecturing us upon our lack of manners.

I detested him.

When he saw me drop the bottle of milk he flew into a rage.

“Eh!” he shouted, “did you think this was a kitchen? Can’t you take better care of things?” As he saw me crouching and wiping the floor and the coats with my handkerchief he added: “You might as well take those coats home. The price will be charged against you. That’ll 187 make you remember that this is not a barn, but a factory. Where were you brought up? Among Indians?”

Some of my shopmates tittered obsequiously, which encouraged Manheimer to further sarcasm.

“Why, he doesn’t even know how to handle a bottle of milk. Did you ever see such a lobster?”

At this there was an explosion of merriment.

“A lobster!” one of the tailors repeated, relishingly.

I could have murdered him as well as Manheimer.

My head was swimming. I was about to say something insulting to my employer, to get up and leave the place demonstratively. But I said to myself that I should soon be through with this kind of life for good, and I held myself in leash.

Two or three minutes later I sat at a machine, eating my milkless lunch. I was trying to forget the incident, trying to think of something else, but in vain. Manheimer’s derision, especially the word “lobster, ” was ringing in my ear.

He passed out of the shop, but ten or fifteen minutes later he came back, and as I saw him walk down the aisle I became breathless with hate. The word “lobster” was buzzing in my brain amid vague, helpless visions of revenge.

Presently my eye fell upon Ansel Chaikin, the designer, and a strange thought flashed upon me.

He was a Russian, like myself. He was an ignorant tailor, as illiterate as Meyer Nodelman, but a born artist in his line. It was largely to his skill that the firm, which was doing exceedingly well, owed the beginning of its success. It was the common talk among the “hands” of the factory that his Americanized copies of French models had found special favor with the buyer of a certain large department store and that this alone gave the house a considerable volume of business. Jeff Manheimer, who superintended the work, was a commonplace man, with more method and system than taste or initiative. Chaikin was the heart and the actual master of the establishment. Yet all this really wonderful designer received was forty-five dollars a week. He knew his value, and he saw that the two brothers were rapidly getting rich, but he was a quiet man, unaggressive and unassuming, and very likely he had not the courage to ask for a raise.

As I now looked at him, with my heart full of rancor for Manheimer, I exclaimed to myself, “What a fool!”

He appeared to me in a new light, as the willing victim of downright robbery. It seemed obvious that the Manheimers could not do without him, that he was in a position to dictate terms to them, even to make them accept him as a third partner. And once the matter had presented itself to me in that light it somehow began to vex me. It got on my nerves, as though it were an affair of my own. I complimented myself upon my keen sense of justice, but in reality this was my name for my disgust with Chaikin’s passivity and for the annoyance and the burning ill-will which the rapid ascent of the firm aroused in me. I begrudged them—or, rather, Jeff—the money they were making through his efficiency.

“The idiot!” I soliloquized. “He ought to start on his own hook with some smart business man for a partner. Let Jeff try to do without that ‘lobster’ of a Russian.”

The idea took a peculiar hold upon my imagination. I could not look at Ansel Chaikin, or think of him, without picturing him leaving the Manheimers in a lurch and becoming a fatal competitor of theirs. I beheld their downfall. I gloated over it.

But Chaikin lacked gumption and enterprise. What he needed was an able partner, some man of brains and force. And so, unbeknown to Chaikin, the notion was shaping itself in my mind of becoming his manufacturing partner.

The thought of Meyer Nodelman’s humble beginnings and of the three hundred-odd dollars I had in my savings-bank whispered encouragement into my ear. I had heard of people who went into manufacturing with even less than that sum. Moreover, it was reasonable to expect that Chaikin had laid up some money of his own. Our precarious life among unfriendly nations has made a thrifty people of us, and for a man like Chaikin forty-five dollars a week, every week in the year, meant superabundance.

The Manheimers were relegated to the background. It was no longer a mere matter of punishing Jeff. It was a much greater thing.

I visioned myself a rich man, of course, but that was merely a detail. What really hypnotized me was the venture of the thing. It was a great, daring game of life.

I tried to reconcile this new dream of mine with my college projects. I was again performing the trick of eating the cake and having it. I would picture myself building up a great cloak business and somehow contriving, at the same time, to go to college.

The new scheme was scarcely ever absent from my mind. I would ponder it over my work and during my meals. It would visit me in my sleep in a thousand grotesque forms. Chaikin became the center of the universe. I was continually eying him, listening for his voice, scrutinizing his look, his gestures, his clothes.

He was an insignificant-looking man of thirty-two, with almost a cadaverous face and a very prominent Adam’s apple. He was not a prepossessing man by any means, but his bluish eyes had a charming look, of boy-like dreaminess, and his smile was even more child-like than his look. He was dressed with scrupulous neatness and rather pretentiously, as behooved his occupation, but all this would scarcely have prevented one from telling him for a tailor from some poor town in Russia.

Now and then my project struck me as absurd. For Chaikin was in the foremost ranks of a trade in which I was one of the ruck. Should he conceive the notion of going into business on his own account, he would have no difficulty in forming a partnership with considerable capital. Why, then, should he take heed of a piteous schemer of my caliber? But a few minutes later I would see the matter in another light.

O
NE Sunday morning in the latter part of May I betook myself to a certain block of new tenement-houses in the neighborhood of East 110th Street and Central Park, then the new quarter of the more prosperous Russian Jews. Chaikin had recently moved into one of these houses, and it was to call on him that I had made my way from down-town. I found him in the dining-room, playing on an accordion, while his wife, who had answered my knock at the door, was busy in the kitchen.

He scarcely knew me. To pave the way to the object of my visit I began by inquiring about designing lessons. As teaching was not in his line, we soon passed to other topics related to the cloak trade. I found him a poor talker and a very uninteresting companion. He answered mostly in monosyllables, or with mute gestures, often accompanied by his child-like grin or by a perplexed stare of his bluish eyes.

Gradually I gave the conversation a more personal turn. When, somewhat flushed, I finally hinted at my plan, he shrank with an air of confusion.

At this juncture his wife made her appearance, followed by her eight-year-old boy. Chaikin looked relieved.

“I hear you are talking business,” she said, summarily taking possession of the situation. “What is it all about?”

Completely taken aback by her domineering manner, I sought escape in embarrassed banter.

“You have scared me so,” I said, “I can’t speak. I’ll tell you everything. That’s just what brings me here. Only let me first catch my breath and take a look at your stalwart little man of a boy.”

Her grave face relaxed into an involuntary smile.

What struck me most in her was the startling resemblance she bore to her husband. The two looked like brother and sister rather than like husband and wife.

“You must be relatives,” I observed, for something pleasant to say, and put my foot in it.

“Not at all,” she replied, with a frown.

To win back her good graces I proceeded to examine Maxie, her boy, in spelling. The stratagem had the desired effect.

We got down to business again. When she heard my plan she paused to survey me. I felt a sinking at the heart. I interpreted her searching look as saying, “The nerve this snoozer has!” But I was mistaken. Her pinched, sallow face grew tense with excitement, and she said, with coy eagerness:

“How can we tell if your plan amounts to anything? If you gave us an idea of how much you could put up—”

“It would not require a million,” I hazarded.

“A million! Who talks of millions! Still, it would take a good deal of capital to start a factory that should be something like.”

“There’ll be no trouble about money,” I parried, fighting shy of the more imposing term “ capital,” which made my paltry three hundred still paltrier.

“There is money and money,” she answered, with furtive glances at me. “A nickel is also money.”

“I am not speaking of nickels, of course.”

“I should say not. It’s a matter of many thousands of dollars.”

I was dumfounded, but instantly rallied. “Of course,” I assented. “At the same time it depends on many things.”

“Still, you ought to give us some idea how much you could put in. Is it—is it, say, fifteen thousand?”

That she should not deem it unnatural for a young man of my station to be able to raise a sum of this size was partly due to her utter lack of experience and partly to an impression prevalent among people of her class that “nothing is impossible in the land of Columbus.”

I pretended to grow thoughtful, with an effect of making computations. I even produced a piece of paper and a pencil and indulged in some sham figuring. At last I said:

“Well, I can’t as yet tell you exactly how much. As I have said, it depends on certain things, but it’ll be all right. Besides, money is really not the most important part in a scheme of this kind. A man of brains and a hustler will make a lot of money, while a fool will lose a lot. There are others who want to go into business with me. Only I know Mr. Chaikin is an honest man, and that’s what I value more than anything else. I hate to take up with people of whom I can’t be sure, don’t you know—”

“You forget the main thing,” she could not forbear to break in. “Mr. Chaikin is the best designer in New York.”

“Everybody knows that,” I conceded, deeming it best to flatter her vanity. “That’s just what makes it ridiculous that he should work for others, make other people rich instead of trying to do something for himself. I have some plans by which the two of us—Mr. Chaikin taking charge of the manufacturing and I of the business outside—would do wonders. We would simply do wonders. There is another fine designer who is anxious to form a partnership with me, but I said to myself, ‘I must first see if I could not get Mr. Chaikin interested.’ ”

Mrs. Chaikin tried to guess who that other designer was, but I pleaded, mysteriously, certain circumstances that placed the seal of discretion on my lips.

“I won’t tell anybody,” she assured me, in a flutter of curiosity.

“ I know you won’t, but I can’t. Honest.”

“But, I tell you, I won’t say a word to anybody. Strike me dumb if I do!”

“I can’t, Mrs. Chaikin,” I besought her.

“Don’t bother,” her husband put in, good-naturedly. “A woman will be a woman.”

I went on to describe the “wonders” that the firm of Chaikin & Levinsky would do. Mrs. Chaikin’s eyes glittered. I held her spellbound. Her husband, who had hitherto been a passive listener, as if the matter under discussion was one in which he was not concerned, began to show signs of interest. It was the longest and most eloquent speech I had ever had occasion to deliver. It seemed to carry conviction.

Children often act as a barometer of their mother’s moods. So when I had finished and little Maxie slipped up close to me and tactily invited me to fondle him I knew that I had made a favorable impression on his mother.

I was detained for dinner. I played with Maxie, gave him problems in arithmetic, went into ecstasies over his “cuteness.” I had a feeling that the way to Mrs. Chaikin’s heart was through Maxie, but I took good care not to overplay my part.

We are all actors, more or less. The question is only what our aim is, and whether we are capable of a “convincing personation.” At the time I conceived my financial scheme I knew enough of human motive to be aware of this.

I
T was a sultry, sweltering July afternoon in May, one of those escapades of the New York climate when the population finds itself in the grip of midsummer discomforts without having had time to get seasoned to them. I went into the Park. I had come away from the Chaikins’ under the impression that if I could raise two or three thousand dollars I might be able, by means of perseverance and diplomacy, to achieve my purpose. But I might as well have set myself to raise two or three millions.