The Rise of David Levinsky (54 page)

When I gazed at the mountain directly opposite the hotel I had a feeling of disappointment. I knew that it was very high, that it took hours to climb it, but I failed to realize it. It was seemingly quite low and commonplace. Darkling at the foot of it was what looked like a moat choked with underbrush and weeds. The spot was about a mile and a half from the hotel, yet it seemed to be only a minute’s walk from me. But then a bird that was flying over that moat at the moment, winging its way straight across it, was apparently making no progress. Was this region exempt from the laws of space and distance? The bewitching azure of the sky and the divine taste of the air seemed to bear out a feeling that it was exempt from any law of nature with which I was familiar. The mountain-peak 406 directly opposite the hotel looked weird now. Was it peopled with Liliputians?

Another bird made itself heard somewhere in the underbrush flanking the brook. It was saying something in querulous accents. I knew nothing of birds, and the song or call of this one sounded so queer to me that I was almost frightened. All of which tended to enhance the uncanny majesty of the whole landscape.

Presently I heard Mrs. Kalch calling to me. She was coming along the veranda, resplendent in a purple dress, a huge diamond breastpin, and huge diamond earrings.

“All alone? All alone?” she exclaimed, as she paused, interlocking her bediamonded fingers in a posture of mock amazement. “All alone? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself to sit moping out here, when there are so many pretty young ladies around? Come along; I’ll find you one or two as sweet as sugar,” kissing the tips of her fingers.

“Thank you, Mrs. Kalch, but I like it here.”

“Mrs. Kalch! Auntie Yetta, you mean.” And the lumps of gold in her mouth glinted good-naturedly.

“Very well. Auntie Yetta.”

“That’s better. Wait! Wait’ll I come back.”

She vanished. Presently she returned and, grabbing me by an arm, stood me up and convoyed me half-way around the hotel to a secluded spot on the rear porch where four girls were chatting quietly.

“ Perhaps you’ll find your predestined one among these,” she said.

“But I have found her already,” I protested, with ill-concealed annoyance.

She took no heed of my words. After introducing me to two of the girls and causing them to introduce me to the other two, she said:

“And now go for him, young ladies! You know who Mr. Levinsky is, don’t you? It isn’t some kike. It’s David Levinsky, the cloak-manufacturer. Don’t miss your chance. Try to catch him.”

“I’m ready,” said Miss Lazar, a pretty brunette in white.

“She’s all right,” declared Auntie Yetta. “Her tongue cuts like a knife that has just been sharpened, but she’s as good as gold.”

“Am I? I ain’t so sure about it. You had better look out, Mr. Levinsky,” the brunette in white warned me.

“Why, that just makes it interesting,” I returned. “Danger is tempting, you know. How are you going to catch me—with a net or a trap?”

Auntie Yetta interrupted us. “I’m off,” she said, rising to go. “I can safely leave you in their hands, Mr. Levinsky. They’ll take care of you,” she said, with a wink, as she departed.

“You haven’t answered my question,” I said to Miss Lazar.

“What was it?”

“She has a poor memory, don’t you know,” laughed a girl in a yellow shirt-waist. She was not pretty, but she had winning blue eyes and her yellow waist became her. “Mr. Levinsky wants to know if you’re going to catch him with a net or with a trap.”

“And how about yourself?” I demanded. “What sort of tools have you?”

“Oh, I don’t think I have a chance with a big fish like yourself,” she replied.

Her companions laughed.

“Well, that’s only her way of fishing,” said Miss Lazar. “She tells every fellow she has no chance with him. That’s her way of getting started. You’d better look out, Mr. Levinsky.”

“And her way is to put on airs and look as if she could have anybody she wanted,” retorted the one of the blue eyes.

“Stop, girls,” said a third, who was also interesting. “If we are going to give away one another’s secrets there’ll be no chance for any of us.”

I could see that their thrusts contained more fact than fiction and more venom than gaiety, but it was all laughed off and everybody seemed to be on the best of terms with everybody else. I looked at this bevy of girls, each attractive in her way, and I became aware of the fact that I was not in the least tempted to flirt with them. “I am a well-behaved, sedate man now, and all because I am engaged,” I congratulated myself. “There is only one woman in the world for me, and that is Fanny, my Fanny, the girl that is going to be my wife in a few weeks from to-day.”

Directly in front of us and only a few yards off was a tennis-court. It was unoccupied at first, but presently there appeared two girls with rackets and balls and they started to play. One of these arrested my attention violently, as it were. I thought her strikingly interesting and pretty. I could not help gazing at her in spite of the eyes that were watching me, and she was growing on me rapidly. It seemed as though absolutely everything about her made a strong appeal to me. She was tall and stately, with a fine pink complexion and an effective mass of chestnut hair. I found that her face attested intellectual dignity and a kindly disposition. I liked her white, strong teeth. I liked the way she closed her lips and I liked the way she opened them into a smile; the way she ran to meet the ball and the way she betrayed disappointment when she missed it. I still seemed to be congratulating myself upon my indifference to women other than the one who was soon to bear my name, when I became conscious of a mighty interest in this girl. I said to myself that she looked refined from head to foot and that her movements had a peculiar rhythm that was irresistible.

Physically her cast of features was scarcely prettier than Fanny’s, for my betrothed was really a good-looking girl, but spiritually there was a world of difference between their faces, the difference between a Greek statue and one of those lay figures that one used to see in front of cigar-stores.

The other tennis-player was a short girl with a long face. I reflected that if she were a little taller or her face were not so long she might not be uninteresting, and that by contrast with her companion she looked homelier than she actually was.

Miss Lazar watched me closely.

“Playing tennis is one way of fishing for fellows,” she remarked.

“So the racket is really a fishing-tackle in disguise, is it?” I returned. “But where are the fellows?”

“Aren’t you one?”

“No.”

“Oh, these two girls go in for highbrow fellows,” said a young woman who had hitherto contented herself with smiling and laughing. “They’re highbrow themselves.”

“Do they use big words?” I asked.

“Well, they’re well read. I’ll say that for them,” observed Miss Lazar, with a fine display of fairness.

“College girls?”

“Only one of them.”

“Which?”

“Guess.”

“The tall one.”

“I thought she’d be the one you’d pick. You’ll have to guess again.”

“What made you think I’d pick her for a college girl?”

“You’ll have to guess that, too. Well, she is an educated girl, all the same.”

She volunteered the further information that the tall girl’s father was a writer, and, as though anxious lest I should take him too seriously, she hastened to add:

“He doesn’t write English, though. It’s Jewish, or Hebrew, or something.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Tevkin,” she answered, under her breath.

The name sounded remotely familiar to me. Had I seen it in some Yiddish paper? Had I heard it somewhere? The intellectual East Side was practically a foreign country to me, and I was proud of the fact. I knew something of its orthodox Talmudists, but scarcely anything of its modem men of letters, poets, thinkers, humorists, whether they wrote in Yiddish, in Hebrew, in Russian, or in English. If I took an occasional look at the socialist Yiddish daily it was chiefly to see what was going on in the Cloak-makers’ Union. Otherwise I regarded everything that was written for the East Side with contempt, and “East Side writer” was synonymous with “greenhorn” and “tramp.” Worse than that, it was identified in my mind with socialism, anarchism, and trade-unionism. It was something sinister, absurd, and uncouth.

But Miss Tevkin was a beautiful girl, nevertheless. So I pitied her for being the daughter of an East Side writer.

The tennis game did not last long. Miss Tevkin and her companion soon went indoors. I went out for a stroll by myself. I was thinking of my journey to Tannersville the next morning. The enforced loss of time chafed me. Of the strong impression which the tall girl had produced on me not a trace seemed to have been left. She bothered me no more than any other pretty girl I might have recently come across. Young women with strikingly interesting faces and figures were not rare in New York.

I had not been walking five minutes when I impatiently returned to the hotel to consult the time-tables.

I
WAS chatting with Rivesman, the lessee of the hotel, across the counter that separated part of his office from the lobby. As I have said, I had known him for many years. He had formerly been in the insurance business, and he had at one time acted as my insurance broker. He was a Talmudist, and well versed in modern Hebrew literature, to boot. He advised me concerning trains to Tannersville, and then we passed to the hotel business and mutual acquaintances.

Presently Miss Tevkin, apparently on her way from her room, paused at the counter, by my side, to leave her key. She was dressed for dinner, although it was not yet half past 4 o’clock and the great Saturday-evening repast, for which train after train was bringing husbands and other “weekenders” to the mountains, was usually a very late affair.

The dress she now wore was a modest gown of navy blue trimmed with lace. The change of attire seemed to have produced a partial change in her identity. She was interesting in a new way, I thought.

“Going to enjoy the fresh air?” Rivesman asked her, gallantly.

“Ye-es,” she answered, pleasantly. “It’s glorious outside.” And she vanished.

“Pretty girl,” I remarked.

“And a well-bred one, too—in the real sense of the word.”

“One of your two-week guests, I suppose,” I said, with studied indifference.

“Yes. She is a stenographer.” Whereupon he named a well-known lawyer, a man prominent in the affairs of the Jewish community, as her employer. “It was an admirer of her father who got the job for her.”

From what followed I learned that Miss Tevkin’s father had once been a celebrated Hebrew poet and that he was no other than the hero of the romance of which Naphtali had told me a few months before I left my native place to go to America, and that her mother was the heroine of that romance. In other words, her mother was the once celebrated beauty, the daughter of the famous Hebrew writer (long since deceased), Doctor Rachaeless of Odessa.

“It was her father, then, who wrote those love-letters!” I exclaimed, excitedly. “And it was about her mother that he wrote them! Somebody told me on the veranda that her name was Miss Tevkin. I did think the name sounded familiar, but I could not locate it.”

The discovery stirred me inordinately. I was palpitating with reminiscent interest and with a novel interest in the beautiful girl who had just stood by my side.

At my request Rivesman, followed by myself, sought her out on the front porch and introduced me to her as “a great admirer of your father’s poetry.”

Seated beside her was a bald-headed man with a lone wisp of hair directly over his forehead whom the hotel-keeper introduced as “Mr. Shapiro, a counselor,” and who by his manner of greeting me showed that he was fully aware of my financial standing.

The old romance of the Hebrew poet and his present wife, and more especially the fact that I had been thrilled by it in Antomir, threw a halo of ineffable fascination around their beautiful daughter.

“So you are a daughter of the great Hebrew poet,” I said in English.

“It’s awfully kind of you to speak like that,” she returned.

“Mr. Levinsky is known for his literary tastes, you know,” Shapiro put in.

“I wish I deserved the compliment,” I rejoined. “Unfortunately, I don’t. I am glad I find time to read the newspapers.”

“The newspapers are life,” observed Miss Tevkin, “and life is the source of literature, or should be.”

“ ‘Or should be!”’ Shapiro mocked her, fondly. “Is that a dig at the popular novels?” And in an aside to me, “Miss Tevkin has no use for them, you know.”

She smiled.

“Still worshiping at the shrine of Ibsen?” he asked her.

“More than ever,” she replied, gaily.

“ I admire your loyalty, though I regret to say that I am still unable to share your taste.”

“It isn’t a matter of taste,” she returned. “It depends on what one is locking for in a play or a novel.”

She smiled with the air of one abstaining from a fruitless discussion.

“She’s a blue-stocking,” I said to myself. “Women of this kind are usually doomed to be old maids.” And yet she drew me with a magnetic force that seemed to be beyond my power of resistance.

It was evident that she enjoyed the discussion and the fact that it was merely a pretext for the lawyer to feast his eyes on her.

I wondered why a bald-headed man with a lone tuft of hair did not repel her.

A younger brother of Shapiro’s, a real-estate broker, joined us. He also was bald-headed, but his baldness formed a smaller patch than the lawyer’s.

The two brothers did most of the talking, and, among other things, they informed Miss Tevkin and myself that they were graduates of the City College. With a great display of reading and repeatedly interrupting each other they took up the cudgels for the “good old school.” I soon discovered, however, that their range was limited to a small number of authors, whose names they uttered with great gusto and to whom they returned again and again. These were Victor Hugo, Dumas, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Coleridge, Edgar Poe, and one or two others. If the lawyer added a new name, like Walter Pater, to his list, the real-estate man would hasten to trot out De Quincey, for example. For the rest they would parade a whole array of writers rather than refer to any one of them in particular. The more they fulminated and fumed and bullied Miss Tevkin the firmer grew my conviction that they had scarcely read the books for which they seemed to be ready to lay down their lives.