The Rise of David Levinsky (36 page)

“I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me what to do, Mr. Eaton. It’s no use bluffing. I have never been in such a fine restaurant in my life. I am scared to death, Mr. Eaton. Take pity.”

The Philadelphian, who was a slow-spoken, slow-witted, though shrewd, man, was perplexed at first.

“ I see,” he said, coloring, and looking confusedly at me.

The next minute he seemed to realize the situation and to enjoy it, too, but even then he was apparently embarrassed. I cracked another joke or two at my own expense, until finally he burst into a hearty laugh and cheerfully agreed to act as master of ceremonies. Not only did he do the ordering, explaining things to me when the waiter was not around, but he also showed me how to use my napkin, how to eat the soup, the fish, the meat, what to do with the finger-bowl, and so forth and so on, to the minutest detail.

“ I am afraid one lesson won’t be enough,” I said. “You must give me another chance.”

“With pleasure,” he replied. “Only the next ‘lesson’ will be on me.” And then he had to tell me what “on me” meant.

He took a fancy to me and that meant orders, not only from him, but also from some people of his acquaintance, buyers from other towns.

 

I sought to dress like a genteel American, my favorite color for clothes and hats being (and still is) dark brown. It became my dark hair well, I thought. The difference between taste and vulgar ostentation was coming slowly, but surely, I hope. I remember the passionate efforts I made to learn to tie a four-in-hand cravat, then a recent invention. I was forever watching and striving to imitate the dress and the ways of the well-bred American merchants with whom I was, or trying to be, thrown. All this, I felt, was an essential element in achieving business success; but the ambition to act and look like a gentleman grew in me quite apart from these motives.

Now, Dora seemed to notice these things in me, and to like them. So I would parade my newly acquired manners before her as I did my neckties or my English vocabulary.

After that lecture I gave her on adverbs she no longer called my English in question. To be educated and an “American lady” had, thanks to Lucy’s influence, become the great passion of her life. It almost amounted to an obsession. She thought me educated and a good deal of an American, so she looked up to me and would listen to my harangues reverently.

O
NE Saturday evening she said to me: “Lord! you are so educated. I wish I had a head like yours.”

“Why, you have an excellent head, Dora,” I replied. “You have no reason to complain.”

She sighed.

“I wish I had not gone into business,” I resumed.

I had already told her, more than once, in fact, how I had been about to enter college when an accident had led me astray; so I now referred to those events, dwelling regretfully upon the sudden change I had made in my life plans.

“It was the devil that put it in my head to become a manufacturer,” I said, bitterly, yet with relish in the “manufacturer.”

“Well, one can be a manufacturer and educated man at the same time,” she consoled me.

“Of course. That’s exactly what I always say,” I returned, joyously. “Still, I wish I had stuck to my original plan. There was a lady in Antomir who advised me to prepare for college. She was always speaking to me about it.

It was about io o’clock. Max was away to his dancing-schools. The children were asleep. We were alone in the living-room.

I expected her to ask who that Antomir lady was, but she did not, so I went on speaking of Matilda of my own accord. I sketched her as an “aristocratic” young woman, the daughter of one of the leading families in town, accomplished, clever, pretty, and “modern.”

“It was she, in fact, who got me the money for my trip to America,” I said, lowering my voice, as one will when a conversation assumes an intimate character.

“Was it?” Dora said, also in a low voice.

“Yes. It is a long story. It is nearly five years since I left home, but I still think of it a good deal. Sometimes I feel as if my heart would snap unless I had somebody to tell about it.”

This was my way of drawing Dora into a flirtation, my first attempt in that direction, though in my heart I had been making love to her for weeks.

I told her the story of my acquaintance with Matilda. She listened with non-committal interest, with an amused, patronizing glimmer of a smile.

“You did not fall in love with her, did you?” she quizzed me as she might Lucy.

“That’s the worst part of it,” I said, gravely. “Is it?” she asked, still gaily, but with frank interest now.

I recounted the episode at length. To put it in plain English, I was using my affair with Matilda (or shall I say her affair with me?) as a basis for an adventure with Dora. At first I took pains to gloss over those details in which I had cut an undignified figure, but I soon dropped all embellishments. The episode stood out so bold in my memory, its appeal to my imagination was so poignant, that I found an intoxicating satisfaction in conveying the facts as faithfully as I knew how. To be telling a complete, unvarnished truth is in itself a pleasure. It is as though there were a special sense of truth and sincerity in our make-up (just as there is a sense of musical harmony, for example), and the gratification of it were a source of delight.

Nor was this my only motive for telling Dora all. I had long since realized that the disdain and mockery with which Matilda handled me had been but a cloak for her interest in my person. So when I was relating to Dora the scenes of my ignominy I felt that the piquant circumstances surrounding them were not unfavorable to me. Anyhow, I was having a singularly intimate talk with Dora and she was listening with the profoundest interest, all the little tricks she employed to disguise it notwithstanding.

In depicting the scene of the memorable night when Matilda came to talk to me at my bedside I emphasized the fact that she had called me a ninny.

“I did not know what she meant,” I said.

Dora tittered, looking at the floor shamefacedly. “The nasty thing!” she said.

“What do you mean?” I inquired, dishonestly.

“I mean just what I say. She is a nasty thing, that grand lady of yours.” And she added another word—the East Side name for a woman of the streets—that gave me a shock.

“Don’t call her that,” I entreated. “Please don’t. You are mistaken about her. I assure you she is a highly respectable lady. She has a heart of gold,” I added, irrelevantly.

“Well, well! You are still in love with her, aren’t you?”

I was tempted to say: “No. It is you I now love.” But I merely said, dolefully: “No. Not any more.”

She contemplated me amusedly and broke into a soft laugh.

The next time we were alone in the house I came back to it. I added some details. I found a lascivious interest in dwelling on our passionate kisses, Matilda’s and mine. Also, it gave me morbid pleasure to have her behold me at Matilda’s feet, lovelorn, disdained, crushed, yet coveted, kissed, triumphant.

Dora listened intently. She strove to keep up an amused air, as though listening to some childish nonsense, but the look of her eye, tense or flinching, and the warm color that often overspread her cheeks, betrayed her.

W
E talked about my first love-affair for weeks. She asked me many questions about Matilda, mostly with that pretended air of amused curiosity. Every time I had something good to say about Matilda she would assail her brutally.

The fact that Dora never referred to my story in the presence of her husband was a tacit confession that we had a secret from him. Outwardly it meant that the secret was mine, not hers; that she had nothing to do with it; but then there was another secret—the fact that she was my sole confidante in a matter of this nature—and this secret was ours in common.

On one occasion, in the course of one of these confabs of ours, she said, with ill-concealed malice:

“Do you really think she cared for you? Not that much,” marking off the tip of her little finger.

“Why should you say that? Why should you hurt my feelings?” I protested.

“It still hurts your feelings, then, does it? There is a faithful lover for you! But what would you have me say? That she loved you as much as you loved her?”

At this Dora jerked her head backward, with a laugh that rang so charmingly false and so virulent that I was impelled both to slap her face and to kiss it.

“But tell me,” she said, with a sudden affectation of sedate curiosity, “was she really so beautiful?”

“I never said she was ‘so beautiful,’ did I? You are far more beautiful than she.”

“Oh, stop joking, please! Can’t you answer seriously?”

“I really mean it.”

“Mean what?”

“That you are prettier than Matilda.”

“Is that the way you are faithful to her?”

“Oh, that was five years ago. Now there is somebody else I am faithful to.”

She was silent. Her cheeks glowed.

“Why don’t you ask who that somebody is?”

“Because I don’t care. What do I care? And please don’t talk like that. I mean what I say. You must promise me never to talk like that,” she said, gravely.

 

During the following few days Dora firmly barred all more or less intimate conversation. She treated me with her usual friendly familiarity, but there was something new in her demeanor, something that seemed to say, “I don’t deny that I enjoy our talks, but that’s all the more reason why you must behave yourself.”

The story of my childhood seemed legitimate enough, so she let me tell her bits of it, and before she was aware of it she was following my childish love-affair with the daughter of one of my despotic school-teachers, my struggles with Satan, and my early dreams of marriage. Gradually she let me draw her out concerning her own past.

 

One evening, while Lucy was playing school-teacher, with Dannie for the class, Dora told me of an episode connected with her betrothal to Max.

“Was that a love match?” I asked, with a casual air, when she had finished.

She winced. “What difference does it make?” she said, with an annoyed look. “We were engaged as most couples are engaged. Much I knew of the love business in those days.”

“You speak as though you married when you were a mere baby. You certainly knew how you felt toward him. ”

“ don’t think I felt anything,” she answered.

“Still,” I insisted, “you said to yourself, ‘This man is going to be my husband; he will kiss me, embrace me.’ How did you feel then?”

“You want to know too much, Levinsky,” she said, coloring. “You know the saying, ‘If you know too much you get old too quick.’ Well, I don’t think I gave him any thought at all. I was too busy thinking of the wedding and of the pretty dress they were making for me. Besides, I was so rattled and so shy. Much I understood. I was not quite nineteen.”

It called to my mind that in the excitement following my mother’s death I was so overwhelmed by the attentions showered on me that it was a day or two before I realized the magnitude of my calamity.

“Anyhow, you certainly knew that marriage is the most serious thing in life,” I persisted.

“Oh, I don’t think I knew much of anything.”

“And after the wedding?”

“After the wedding I knew that I was a married woman and must be contented,” she parried.

“But this is not love,” I pressed her.

“Oh, let us not talk of these things, pray! Don’t ask me questions like that,” she said in a low, entreating voice. “It isn’t right.”

“I don’t know if it is right or wrong,” I replied, also in a low voice. “All I do know is that I am interested in everything that ever happened to you.”

Silence fell. She was the first to break it. She tried to talk of trivialities. I scarcely listened. She broke off again.

“Dora!” I said, amorously. “My heart is so full.”

“Don’t,” she whispered, with a gesture of pained supplication. “Talk of something else, pray.”

“I can’t. I can’t talk of anything else. Nor think of anything else, either.”

“You mustn‘t, you mustn’t, you mustn’t,” she said, with sudden vehemence, though still with a beseeching ring in her voice. “I won’t let you. May I not live to see my children again if I will. Do you hear, Levinsky? Do you hear? Do you hear? I want you to understand it. Be a man. Have a heart, Levinsky. You must behave yourself. If you don’t you’ll have to move. There can’t be any other way about it. If you are a real friend of mine, not an enemy, you must behave yourself.” She spoke with deep, solemn earnestness, somewhat in the singsong of a woman reading the Yiddish Commentary on the Five Books of Moses or wailing over a grave. She went on: “Why should you vex me? You are a respectable man. You don’t want to do what is wrong. You don’t want to make me miserable, do you? So be good, Levinsky. I 267 beg of you. I beg of you. Be good. Be good. Be good. Let us never have another talk like this. Do you promise?”

I was silent.

“Do you promise, Levinsky? You must. You must. Do you promise me never to come back to this kind of talk?”

“I do,” I said, like a guilty school-boy.

She was terribly in earnest. She almost broke my heart. I could not thwart her will.

She was in love with me.

 

Days passed. There was no lack of unspoken tenderness between us. That she was tremulously glad to see me every time I came home was quite obvious, but she bore herself in such a manner that I never ventured to allude to my feeling, much less to touch her hand or sit close to her.

“It is as well that I should not,” I often said to myself. “Am I not happy as it is? Is it not bliss enough to have a home—her home? It would be too awful to forfeit it.” I registered a vow to live up to the promise she had exacted from me, but I knew that I would break it.