The Rise of David Levinsky (24 page)

And so we went on loving jointly, Jake and I, the companionship of our passion apparently stimulating our romance as companionship at a meal stimulates the appetite of the diners. Each of us seemed to be infatuated with Madame Klesmer. Yet the community of this feeling, far from arousing mutual jealousy in us, seemed to strengthen the ties of our friendship.

We would hum her songs in duet, recite her lines, compare notes on our dreams of happiness with her. One day we composed a love-letter to her, a long epistle full of Biblical and homespun poetry, which we copied jointly, his lines alternating with mine, and which we signed: “Your two lovelorn slaves whose hearts are panting for a look of your star-like eyes. Jacob and David.” We mailed the letter without affixing any address.

The next evening we were in the theater, and when she appeared on the stage and shot a glance to the gallery Jake nudged me violently.

“But she does not know we are in the gallery,” I argued. “She must think we are in the orchestra.”

“Hearts are good guessers.”

“Guessers nothing.”

“ ‘S-sh! Let’s listen.”

Madame Klesmer was playing the part of a girl in a modem Russian town. She declaimed her lines, speaking like a prophetess in ancient Israel, and I liked it extremely. I was fully aware that it was unnatural for a girl in a modem Russian town to speak like a prophetess in ancient Israel, but that was just why I liked it. I thought it perfectly proper that people on the stage should not talk as they would off the stage. I thought that this unnatural speech of theirs was one of the principal things an audience paid for. The only actor who spoke like a human being was the comedian, and this, too, seemed to be perfectly proper, for a comedian was a fellow who did not take his art seriously, and so I thought that this natural talk of his was part of his fun-making. I thought it was something like a clown burlesquing the Old Testament by reading it, not in the ancient intonations of the synagogue, but in the plain, conversational accents of every-day life.

During the intermission, in the course of our talk about Madame Klesmer, Jake said:

“Do you know, Levinsky, I don’t think you really love her.”

“I love her as much as you, and more, too,” I retorted.

“How much
do
you love her? Would you walk from New York to Philadelphia if she wanted you to do so?”

“Why should she? What good would it do her?”

“But suppose she does want it?”

“How can I suppose such nonsense?”

“Well, she might just want to see how much you love her.”

“A nice test, that.”

“Oh, well, she might just get that kind of notion. Women are liable to get any kind of notion, don’t you know,”

“Well, if Madame Klesmer got that kind of notion I should tell her to walk to Philadelphia herself.”

“Then you don’t love her.”

“ I love her as much as you do, but if she took it into her head to make a fool of me I should send her to the eighty devils.”

He winced. “And you call that love, don’t you?” he said, with a sneer in the comer of his pretty mouth. “As for me, I should walk to Boston, if she wanted me to.”

“Even if she did not promise to let you kiss her?”

“Even if she did not.”

“And if she did?”

“I should walk to Chicago.”

“And if she promised to be your mistress?”

“Oh, what’s the use talking that way?” he protested, blushing.

“Aren’t you shy! A regular bride-to-be, I declare.”

“Stop!” he said, coloring once again.

It dawned upon me that he was probably chaste, and, searching his face with a mocking look, I said:

“I bet you you are still innocent.”

“Leave me alone, please,” he retorted, softly.

“I have hit it, then,” I importuned him, with a great sense of my own superiority.

“ Do let me alone, will you?”

“ I just want you to tell me whether you are innocent or not.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Of course you are.”

“And if I am? Is it a disgrace?”

“Who says it is?”

I desisted. He became more attractive than ever to me.

Nevertheless, I made repeated attempts to deprave him. His chastity bothered me. The idea of breaking it down became an irresistible temptation. I would ridicule him for a sissy, appeal to him in the name of his health, beg him as one does for a personal favor, all in vain.

He spoke better English than I, with more ease, and in that pretty basso of his which I envied. He had never read Dickens or any other English author, but he was familiar with some subjects to which I was a stranger. He was well grounded in arithmetic, knew some geography, and now with a view of qualifying for the study of medicine, he was preparing, with the aid of a private teacher, for the Regents’ examination in algebra, geometry, English composition, American and English history. I thought he did not study “deeply” enough, that he took more real interest in his collars and neckties, the shine of his shoes, or the hang of his trousers than he did in his algebra or history.

By his cleanliness and tidiness he reminded me of Naphtali, which, indeed, had something to do with my attachment for him. My relations toward him echoed with the feelings I used to have for the reticent, omniscient boy of Abner’s Court, and with the hoarse, studious young Talmudist with whom I would “famish in company.” He had neither Naphtali’s brains nor his individuality, yet I looked up to him and was somewhat under his influence. I adopted many of the English phrases he was in the habit of using and tried to imitate his way of dressing. As a consequence, he would sometimes assume a patronizing tone with me, addressing me with a good-natured sneer which I liked in spite of myself.

We made a compact to speak nothing but English, and, to a considerable extent, we kept it.

A
FEW weeks of employment were succeeded by another period of enforced idleness. I took up arithmetic, but reading was still a great passion with me. My mornings and forenoons during that slack season were mostly spent over Dickens or Thackeray.

I now lived in a misshapen attic room which I rented of an Irish family in what was then a Gentile neighborhood. I had chosen that street for the English I had expected to hear around me. I had lived more than two months in that attic, and almost the only English I heard from my neighbors were the few words my landlady would say to me when I paid her my weekly rent. Yet, somehow, the place seemed helpful to me, as though its very atmosphere exuded a feeling for the language I was so eager to master. I made all sorts of advances to the Irish family, all sorts of efforts to get into social relations with them, all to no purpose. Finally, one evening I had a real conversation with one of my landlady’s sons. My window gave me trouble and he came up to put it in working order for me. We talked of his work and of mine. I told him of my plans about going to college. He was interested and I thought him charmingly courteous and sociable. He remained about an hour and a half in my room. When he had departed I was in high spirits. I seemed to feel the progress my English had made in that hour and a half.

My bed was so placed that by lying prone, diagonally across it, my head toward the window and my feet suspended in the air, I would get excellent daylight. So this became my favorite posture when I read in the daytime. Thus, lying on my stomach, with a novel under my eyes and the dictionary by my side, I would devour scores of pages. In a few weeks, often reading literally day and night, I read through
Nicholas Nickleby and Vanity Fair.
Thackeray’s masterpiece did not strike me as being in the same class with anything by Dickens. It seemed to me that anybody in command of bookish English ought to be able to turn out a work like
Vanity Fair,
where men and things were so simple and so natural that they impressed me like people and things I had known. Indeed, I had a lurking feeling that I, too, could do it, after a while at least. On the other hand,
Nicholas Nickleby
and
Dombey and Son
were so full of extraordinary characters, unexpected wit, outbursts of beautiful rhetoric, and other wonderful things, that their author appealed to me as something more than a human being. And yet deep down in my heart I enjoyed Thackeray more than I did Dickens.

It was at the East Side branch of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association that I obtained my books. It was a sort of university settlement in which educated men and women from up-town acted as “workers.” The advice these would give me as to my reading, their kindly manner, their native English, and, last but not least, the flattering way in which they would speak of my intellectual aspirations, led me to spend many an hour in the place. The great thing was to hear these American-born people speak their native tongue and to have them hear me speak it. It was the same as in the case of the chat I had with the son of my Irish landlady. Every time I had occasion to spend five or ten minutes in their company I would seem to be conscious of a perceptible improvement in my English.

Some days I would be so carried away by my reading that I never opened my arithmetic. At other times I would drift into an arithmetical mood and sit up all night doing problems.

When I happened to be in raptures over some book I would pester Jake with lengthy accounts of it, dwelling on the chapters I had read last and trying to force my exaltation upon him. As a rule, he was bored, but sometimes he would become interested in the plot or in some romantic scene. One evening, as we were discussing love in general, I said:

“Love is the greatest thing in the world.”

“Sure it is,” he answered. “But if you love and are not loved in return it is nothing but agony.”

“Even then it is sweet,” I rejoined, reflectively, the image of Matilda before me.

“How can pain be sweet?”

“But it can.”

“If you were really in love with Madame Klesmer you wouldn’t think so.”

“I love her as much as you do.”

“You are always saying you do, but you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.” And suddenly lapsing into a confidential tone, I questioned him: “By the way, Jake, is this the first time you have ever been in love?”

“Why?”

“I just want to know. Is it?”

“What difference does it make? Have
you
ever been in love before?”

“What difference does that make? If you answer my question I shall answer yours.”

“Well, then, I have never been in love before.”

“And I have.”

He was intensely interested, and I confided my love story in him, which served to strengthen our friendship still further. When I concluded my narrative he said, thoughtfully:

“Of course you don’t love Madame Klesmer. I tell you what, Levinsky, you are still in love with Matilda.”

I made no answer.

“Anyhow, you don’t love Madame Klesmer.”

This time he said it without reproach. Once I was in love with somebody else I was excused.

 

The next “season” came around. I was a full-fledged helper now, and, according to the customary arrangement, I received thirty per cent. of what Joe received for my work. This brought me from twenty to twenty-five dollars a week, quite an overwhelming sum, according to my then standard of income and expenditures. I saved about fifteen dollars a week. I shall never forget the day when my capital reached the round figure of one hundred dollars. I was in a flutter. When I looked at the passers-by in the street I would say to myself, “These people have no idea that I am worth a hundred dollars.”

Another thing I was ever conscious of was the fact that I had earned the hundred dollars by my work. There was a touch of solemnity in my mood, as though I had performed some feat of valor or rendered some great service to the community. I was impelled to convey this feeling to Jake, but when I attempted to put it into words it was somehow lost in a haze and what I said was something quite prosaic.

“Guess how much I have in the savings-bank?” I began.

“I haven’t any idea. How much?”

“Just one hundred.”

“Really?”

“Honest. But, then, what does it amount to, after all? Of course, it is pleasant to feel that you have a trade and that you know how to keep a dollar, don’t you know.”

So far from endearing me to the cloak trade, as might have been expected, the hundred dollars killed at one stroke all the interest I had taken in it. It lent reality to my vision of college. Cloak-making was now nothing but a temporary round of dreary toil, an unavoidable stepping-stone to loftier occupations.

Another year and I should be a fully developed mechanic, working on my own hook—that is, as the immediate employee of some manufacturer or contractor. “I shall soon be earning forty or fifty dollars a week,” I would muse. “At that rate I shall save up plenty of money in much less time than I expected. I shall spend as little as possible and study as hard as possible.”

The Regents’ examinations were not exacting in those days. I could have prepared to qualify for admission to a school of medicine, law, or civil engineering in a very short time. But I aimed higher. I knew that many of the professional men on the East Side, and, indeed, everywhere else in the United States, were people of doubtful intellectual equipment, while I was ambitious to be a cultured man “in the European way.” There was an odd confusion of ideas in my mind. On the one hand, I had a notion that to “become an American” was the only tangible form of becoming a man of culture (for did not I regard the most refined and learned European as a “greenhorn”?); on the other hand, the impression was deep in me that American education was a cheap machine-made product.

C
OLLEGE! The sound was forever buzzing in my ear. The seven letters were forever floating before my eyes. They were a magic group, a magic whisper. Matilda was to hear of me as a college man. What would she say?