The Rise of David Levinsky (37 page)

She was in love with me. She had an iron will, but I hoped that this, too, would soon be broken.

There were moments when I would work myself up to an exalted, religious kind of mood over it. “I should be a vile creature if I interfered with the peace of this house,” I would exhort myself, passionately. “Max has been a warm friend to me. Oh, I will be good.”

Dora talked less than usual. She, too, seemed to be a changed person. She was particularly taciturn when we happened to be alone in the house, and then it would be difficult for us to look each other in the face. Such tête-à-têtes occurred once or twice a week, quite late in the evening. I was very busy at the shop and I could never leave it before 10, 11, or even 12, except on Sabbath eve (Friday night), when it was closed. On those evenings when Max stayed out very late I usually found her alone in the little dining - room, sewing, mending, or—more often—poring over Lucy’s school reader or story-book.

After exchanging a few perfunctory sentences with her, each of us aware of the other’s embarrassment, I would take a seat a considerable distance from her and take up a newspaper or clipping from one, while she went on with her work or reading. Lucy had begun to take juvenile books out of the circulating library of the Educational Alliance, so her mother would read them also. The words were all short and simple and Dora had not much difficulty in deciphering their meaning. Anyhow, she now never sought my assistance for her reading. I can still see her seated at the table, a considerable distance from me, moving her head from word to word and from line to line, and silently working her lips, as though muttering an incantation. I would do her all sorts of little services (though she never asked for any), all silently, softly, as if performing a religious rite.

 

I have said that on such occasions I would read my newspaper or some clipping from it. In truth I read little else in those days. Editorials of the daily press interested me as much as the most sensational news, and if some of the more important leading articles in my paper had to be left unread on the day of their publication I would clip them and glance them over at the next leisure moment, sometimes days later.

The financial column was followed by me with a sense of being a member of a caste for which it was especially intended, to the exclusion of the rest of the world. At first the jargon of that column made me feel as though I had never learned any English at all. But I was making headway in this jargon, too, and when I struck a recondite sentence I would cut the few lines out and put them in my pocket, on the chance of coming across somebody who could interpret them for me. Often, too, I would clip and put away a paragraph containing some curious piece of information or a bit of English that was an addition to my knowledge of the language. My inside pocket was always full of all sorts of clippings.

I
T was about this time that I found myself confronted with an unexpected source of anxiety in my business affairs. There were several circumstances that made it possible for a financial midget like myself to outbid the lions of the cloak-and-suit industry. Now, however, a new circumstance arose which threatened to rob me of my chief advantage and to undermine the very foundation of my future.

The rent of my loft, which was in the slums, was, comparatively speaking, a mere trifle, while my overhead expense amounted to scarcely anything at all. I did my own bookkeeping, and a thirteen-year-old girl, American-born, school-bred, and bright, whose bewigged mother was one of my finishers, took care of the shop while I was out, helped me with my mail, and sewed on buttons between-whiles—all for four dollars a week. Another finisher, a young widow, saved me the expense of a figure woman. To which should be added that I did business on a profit margin far beneath the consideration of the well-known firms. All this, however, does not include the most important of all the items that gave me an advantage over the princes of the trade. That was cheap labor.

Three of my men were excellent tailors. They could have easily procured employment in some of the largest factories, where they would have been paid at least twice as much as I paid them. They were bewhiskered, elderly people, strictly orthodox and extremely old-fashioned as to dress and habits. They felt perfectly at home in my shop, and would rather work for me and be underpaid than be employed in an up-to-date factory where a tailor was expected to wear a starched collar and necktie and was made the butt of ridicule if he covered his head every time he took a drink of water. These, however, were minor advantages. The important thing, the insurmountable obstacle which kept these three skilled tailors away from the big cloak-shops, was the fact that one had to work on Saturdays there, while in my place one could work on Sunday instead of Saturday.

My pressers were of the same class as my tailors. As for my operators, who were younger fellows and had adopted American ways, my shop had other attractions for them. For example, my operations were limited to a very small number of styles, and, as theirs was piece-work, it meant greater earnings. While the employee of a Broadway firm (or of one of its contractors) was engaged on a large variety of garments, being continually shifted from one kind of work to another, a man working for me would be taken up with the same style for many days in succession, thus developing a much higher rate of speed and a fatter pay-envelope.

Altogether, I always contrived to procure the cheapest labor obtainable, although this, as we have seen, by no means implied that my “hands” were inferior mechanics. The sum and substance of it all was that I could afford to sell a garment for less than what was its cost of production in the best-known cloak-houses.

My business was making headway when the Cloak and Suit Makers’ Union sprang into life again, with the usual rush and commotion, but with unusual portents of strength and stability. It seemed as if this time it had come to stay. My budding little establishment was too small, in fact, to be in immediate danger. It was one of a scattered number of insignificant places which the union found it difficult to control. Still, cheap labor being my chief excuse for being, the organization caused me no end of worry.

“Just when a fellow is beginning to make a living all sorts of black dreams will come along and trip him up,” I complained to Meyer Nodelman, bitterly. “A bunch of good-for-nothings, too lazy to work, will stir up trouble, and there you are.”

“Oh, it won’t last long,” Meyer Nodelman consoled me. “Don’t be excited, anyhow. Business does not always go like grease, you know. You must be ready for trouble too. ”

He told me of his own experiences with unions and he drifted into a philosophic view of the matter. “You and I want to make as much money as possible, don’t we?” he said. “Well, the working-men want the same. Can you blame them? We are fighting them and they are fighting us. The world is not a wedding-feast, Levinsky. It is a big barn-yard full of chickens and they are scratching one another, and scrambling over one another. Why? Because there are little heaps of grain in the yard and each chicken wants to get as much of it as possible. So let us try our best. But why be mad at the other chickens? Scratch away, Levinsky, but what’s the use being excited?”

He gave a chuckle, and I could not help smiling, but at heart I was bored and wretched.

The big manufacturers could afford to pay union wages, yet they were fighting tooth and nail, and I certainly could not afford to pay high wages. If I had to, I should have to get out of business.

Officially mine had become a union shop, yet my men continued to work on non-union terms. They made considerably more money by working for non-union wages than they would in the places that were under stringent union supervision. They could work any number of hours in my shop, and that was what my piece-workers wanted. To toil from sunrise till long after sunset was what every tailor was accustomed to in Antomir, for instance. Only over there one received a paltry few shillings at the end of the week. while I paid my men many dollars.

So far, then, I had been successful in eluding the vigilance of the walking delegates and my shop was in full blast from 5 in the morning to midnight, whereas in the genuine union shops the regular workday was restricted to ten hours, and overtime to three, which, coupled with the especial advantage accruing from a limited number of styles handled, made my shop a desirable place to my “hands.”

 

A storm broke. All cloak-manufacturers formed a coalition and locked out their union men. A bitter struggle ensued. As it was rich in quaint “human-nature” material, the newspapers bestowed a good deal of space upon it.

I made a pretense of joining in the lockout, my men clandestinely continuing to work for me. More than that, my working force was trebled, for, besides filling my own orders, I did some of the work of a well-known firm which found it much more difficult to procure non-union labor than I did. What was a great calamity to the trade in general seemed to be a source of overwhelming prosperity to me. But the golden windfall did not last long. The agitation and the picketing activities of the union, aided by the
Arbeiter Zeitung,
a Yiddish socialist weekly, were spreading a spell of enthusiasm (or fear) to which my men gradually succumbed. My best operator, a young fellow who exercised much influence over his shopmates and who had hitherto been genuinely devoted to me, became an ardent convert to union principles and led all my operatives out of the shop. I organized a shop elsewhere, but it was soon discovered.

Somebody must have reported to the editor of the
Arbeiter
Zeitung that at one time I had been a member of the union myself, for that weekly published a scurrilous paragraph, branding me as a traitor.

I read the paragraph with mixed rage and pain, and yet the sight of my name in print flattered my vanity, and when the heat of my fury subsided I became conscious of a sneaking feeling of gratitude to the socialist editor for printing the attack on me. For, behold! the same organ assailed the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Rothschilds, and by calling me “a fleecer of labor” it placed me in their class. I felt in good company. I felt, too, that while there were people by whom “fleecers” were cursed, there were many others who held them in high esteem, and that even those who cursed them had a secret envy for them, hoping some day to be fleecers of labor like them.

The only thing in that paragraph that galled me was the appellation of “cockroach manufacturer” by which it referred to me. I was going to parade the “quip” before Max and Dora, but thought better of it. The notion of Dora hearing me called “cockroach” made me squirm.

But Max somehow got wind of the paragraph, and one evening as I came home for supper he said, good-naturedly:

“You got a spanking, didn’t you? I have seen what they say in the
Arbeiter Zeitung
about you.”

“Oh, to the eighty black years with them!” I answered, blushing, and hastened to switch the conversation to the lockout and strike in general. “Oh, we’ll get all the men we want,” I said. “It’s only a matter of time. We’ll teach these scoundrels a lesson they’ll never forget.”

“If only you manufacturers stick together.”

“You bet we will. We can wait. We are in no hurry. We can wait till those tramps come begging for a job,” I said. For the benefit of Dora I added a little disquisition on the opportunities America offered to every man who had brains and industry, and on the grudge which men like myself were apt to arouse in lazy fellows. “Those union leaders have neither brains nor a desire to work. That’s why they can’t work themselves up,” I said. “Yes, and that’s why they begrudge those who can. All those scoundrels are able to do is to hatch trouble.”

I spoke as if I had been a capitalist of the higher altitudes and of long standing. That some of the big cloak firms had promised to back me with funds to keep me from yielding to the union I never mentioned.

M
Y shop being practically closed, I was at home most of the time, not only in the evening, but many a forenoon or afternoon as well. Dora and I would hold interminable conversations. Our love was never alluded to. A relationship on new terms seemed to have been established between us. It was as if she were saying: “Now, isn’t this better? Why can’t we go on like this forever?”

Sometimes I would watch her read with Lucy. Or else I would take up a newspaper or a book and sit reading it at the same table. Dora was making rapid headway in her studies. It was July and Lucy was free from school, so she would let her spend many an hour in the street, but she caused her to spend a good deal of time with her, too. If she did not read with her she would talk or listen to her. I often wondered whether it was for fear of being too much thrown into my company that she would make the child stay indoors. At all events, her readings, spelling contests, or talks with Lucy bore perceptible fruit. Her English seemed to be improving every day, so much so that we gradually came to use a good deal of that language even when we were alone in the house; even when every word we said had an echo of intimacy with which the tongue we were learning to speak seemed to be out of accord.

One evening mother and daughter sat at the open parlor window. While I was reclining in an easy-chair at the other end of the room Lucy was narrating something and Dora was listening, apparently with rapt attention. I watched their profiles. Finally I said:

“She must be telling you something important, considering the interest you are taking in it.”

“Everything she says is important to me,” Dora answered.

“What has she been telling you?”

“Oh, about her girls, about their brothers and their baseball games, about lots of things,” she said, with a far-away tone in her voice. “ I want to know everything about her. Everything. I wish I could get right into her. I wish I could be a child like her. Oh, why can’t a person be born over again?”