The Rise of David Levinsky (57 page)

The band was again playing with might and main. The vehement little conductor was again exerting every nerve and muscle. His bow, which was also his baton, was pouring vim and sex mystery into the dancers. As I looked at him it seemed to me as though the music, the thunderous clatter of feet, and the hum of voices all came from the fiery rhythm of his arm.

Finally, I discovered Miss Tevkin. She was dancing with a sallow-faced, homely, scholarly-looking fellow. The rhythmic motion of her tall, stately frame, as it floated and swayed through the dazzling light, brought a sob to my throat.

When the waltz was over and her cavalier was taking her to a seat I caught her eye. I nodded and smiled to her. She returned the greeting, but immediately averted her face. Again I felt as if she had slapped my cheek. Was I repugnant to her? I thought of my victory over the acrimonious photographer at the railroad station. Had I not won her favor there? And it came over me that even on that occasion she had shown me but scant cordiality. Was it all because of Auntie Yetta’s idiotic jest?

She beckoned to Miss Siegel, who was on the other side of the hall, and presently she was joined by her and by some other young people.

She danced indefatigably, now with this man, now with that, but always of the same “set.” I watched her. Sometimes, as she waltzed, she talked and laughed brokenly, exchanging jokes with her partner or with some other dancing couple. Sometimes she looked solemnly absorbed, as though dancing were a sacred function. I wondered whether she was interested in any one of these fellows in particular. I could see that it gave her special pleasure to waltz with that sallow-faced man, but he was the best dancer in her group, and so homely that I discarded the theory of her caring for him otherwise than as a waltzing partner as absurd. Nor did she seem to be particularly interested in anybody else on the floor. As I scrutinized the men of her “set” I said to myself: “They seem to be school-teachers or writers, or beginning physicians, perhaps. They probably make less than one-third of what I pay Bender. Yet they freely talk and joke with her, while I cannot even get near her.”

Miss Lazar, half naked, had been dancing with various partners, most of all with a freckled lad of sixteen or seventeen who looked as though he were panting to kiss her. She and I had exchanged smiles and pleasantry, but in her semi-nudity she was far less prepossessing than she had been in the afternoon, and I had an uncontrollable desire to announce it to her, or to hurt her in some other way. Finally, seeing a vacant seat by my side, she abruptly broke away from the freckled youth and took it.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Ben,” she said. “I’m tired.”

Ben looked the picture of despair.

“Don’t cry, Ben. Go out and take a walk, or dance with some other girl.”

“Is this your catch after many days of fishing?” I asked.

“Nope. I’m angling for bigger fish. He’s just Ben, a college boy. He has fallen in love with me this evening. When I dance with somebody else he gets awful jealous.” She laughed.

“He’s a manly-looking boy, for all his freckles.”

“He is. But how would you like a little girl to fall in love with you?”

I made no answer.

“Why don’t you dance?” she asked.

“Not in my line.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I never cared to learn it,” I answered, impatiently.

“Come. I’ll show you how. It’s very simple.”

“Too old for that kind of thing.”

“Too old? How old are you?”

“That’s an indiscreet question. Would you tell me
your
age?”

“Indeed I would. Why not?” she said, with sportive defiance. “Only you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Why wouldn’t I? Do you look much older?”

“Oh, you cruel thing! I’m just twenty-three years and four months to-day. There!” she said, with embarrassed gaiety.

“A sort of birthday, isn’t it? I congratulate you.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

A pause. “So you won’t tell me how old you are, will you?” she resumed.

“What do you want to know it for? Are you in the life-insurance business?”

Another pause.

“Look at that girl over there,” she said, trying to make conversation. “She’s showing off her slender figure. She thinks she looks awful American.”

“You do have a sharp tongue.”

“But you remember what Mrs. Kalch said: ‘A sharp tongue, but a kind heart.”’

The band struck up a two-step.

Ben was coming over to her, his freckled face the image of supplication. She shut her eyes and shook her head and the boy stopped short, his jaw dropping as he did so.

“Don’t be hard on the poor boy,” I pleaded.

“That’s none of your business. I want
you
to dance with me. Come on. I’ll teach you.”

I shut my eyes and shook my head precisely as she had done to Ben.

She burst into a laugh. “Ain’t you tired of being a wall-flower?”

“I love it.”

“Do you really? Or maybe you want to watch somebody?”

“ I want to watch everybody,” I replied, coloring the least bit. “When you were dancing I watched you, and I thought—well, I won’t tell you what I thought.”

A splash of color overspread her face.

“Go ahead. Speak out!” she said, with a sick smile.

I took pity on her. “I’m joking, of course. But I do like to watch people when they dance,” I said, earnestly. “They do it in so many different ways, don’t you know.”

I proceeded to point out couple after couple, commenting upon their peculiar manner and the special expression of their faces. One man was seemingly about to hurl his partner at somebody. Another man was eying other women over the shoulder of the one with whom he danced, apparently his wife. One woman was clinging to her partner with all her might, while her half-shut eyes and half-opened mouth seemed to say, “My, isn’t it sweet!”

Miss Lazar greeted my observations with bursts of merry approval. Encouraged by this and full of mischief and malice, I made her watch a man with tapering white side-whiskers and watery eyes who was staring at the bare bust of a fat woman.

“You had better look out, for his watery eyes will soon be on you.”

Miss Lazar lowered her head and burst into a confused giggle.

“You’re a holy terror,” she declared.

I was tempted to take her out into the night and hug and kiss her and tell her that she was a nuisance, but the fear of a breach-of-promise suit held me in leash.

I rose to go. As I picked my way through the crowd I watched Miss Tevkin, who sat between Miss Siegel and one of their cavaliers. Our eyes met, but she hastened to look away.

“She has certainly made up her mind to shun me,” I thought, wretchedly. “She knows I am worth about a million, and yet she does not want to have anything to do with me. Must be a Socialist. The idea of a typewriter girl cutting me! Pooh! I could get a prettier girl than she, and one well-educated, too, if I only cared for that kind of thing in a wife. Let her stick to her beggarly crowd!”

It all seemed so ridiculous. I was baffled, perplexed, full of contempt and misery at once. “Perhaps she is engaged, after all,” I comforted myself, feeling that there was anything but comfort in the reflection.

I was burning to have an explanation with her, to remove any bad impression I might have made upon her.

An asphalt walk in front of the pavilion and the adjoining section of the lawn were astir with boarders. A tall woman of thirty, of excellent figure, and all but naked, passed along like a flame, the men frankly gloating over her flesh.

“Wait a moment! What’s your hurry?” a young stallion shouted, running after her hungrily.

In another spot, on the lawn, I saw a young man in evening dress chaffing a bare-shouldered girl who looked no more than fifteen.

“What! Sweet sixteen and not yet kissed?” he said to her, aloud. “Go on! I don’t believe it. Anyhow, I’d like to be the fellow who’s going to get you.”

“Would you? I’ll tell your wife about it,” the little girl replied, with the good humor of a woman of forty.

“Never mind my wife. But how about the fellow who is going to marry you?”

“I’d like to see him myself. I hope he ain’t going to be some boob.”

The air was redolent of grass, flowers, ozone, and sex. All this was flavored with Miss Tevkin’s antipathy for me.

T
HE next morning I awoke utterly out of sorts. That I was going to take the first train for Tannersville seemed to be a matter of course, and yet I knew that I was not going to take that train, nor any other that day. I dressed myself and went out for a walk up the road, some distance beyond the grove. The sun was out, but it had rained all night and the sandy road was damp, solid, and smooth, like baked clay. It was half an hour before breakfast-time when I returned to my cottage across the road from the hotel. As I was about to take a chair on the tiny porch I perceived the sunlit figure of Miss Tevkin in the distance. She wore a large sailor hat and I thought it greatly enhanced the effect of her tall figure. She was making her way over a shaky little bridge. Then, reaching the road, she turned into it. I remained standing like one transfixed. The distance gave her new fascination. Every little while she would pause to look up through something that glittered in the sunshine, apparently an opera-glass. I had never heard that opera-glasses were used for observing birds, but this was evidently what she was doing at this moment, and the proceeding quickened my sense not only of her intellectual refinement, but also of her social distinction. Presently she turned into a byway, passed the grove, and was lost to view.

I seated myself, my eye on the spot where I had seen her disappear. Somebody greeted me from the hotel lawn. I returned the salutation mechanically and went on gazing at that spot. I knew that I was making a fool of myself, but I could not help it. My will-power was gone as it might from the effect of some drug.

When she reappeared at last and I saw her coming back I crossed over to the hotel veranda so as to be near her when she should arrive. I found several of the boarders there, including the lawyer, the photographer, and a jewelry merchant of my acquaintance. We all watched her coming. At one moment, as she leveled her opera-glass at a bird, the lawyer said:

“Studying birds. She’s a great girl for studying. She is.”

“Studying nothing!” the photographer jeered. “It’s simply becoming to her. It’s effective, don’t you know.”

The lawyer smiled sagely, as if what Mendelson said was precisely what he himself had meant to intimate.

I was inclined to think that Mendelson was right, but this did not detract from the force that drew me to Miss Tevkin.

When she reached the veranda the lawyer gallantly offered her a chair, but she declined it, pleasantly, and went indoors. Her high heels had left deep, clear-cut imprints in a small patch of damp, sandy ground near the veranda. This physical trace of her person fascinated me. It was a trace of stern hostility, yet I could not keep my eye away from it. I gazed and gazed at those footprints of hers till I seemed to be growing stupid and dizzy. “Am I losing my head?” I said to myself. “Am I obsessed? Why, I saw her yesterday for the first time and I have scarcely spoken to her. What the devil is the matter with me?”

After breakfast we returned to the veranda. The jewelry-dealer and the lawyer bored me unmercifully. Finally I was saved from them by the arrival of the Sunday papers, but my reading was soon disturbed by the intrusions of a mother and her marriageable daughter. There was no escape. I had to lay down my paper and let them torture me. There was a striking family resemblance between the two, yet the daughter was as homely as the mother was pretty. “She isn’t as prepossessing as her ma, of course,” the older woman seemed to be saying to me, “but she’s charming, all the same, isn’t she?”

Miss Lazar was watching me at a respectful distance. Mrs. Kalch was deep in a game of pinochle in a small ground-floor room that gave out on the veranda. The window was open and I could hear Mrs. Kalch’s voice. She seemed to have been losing. The little room, by the way, was used both as a synagogue and a gambling-room. In the mornings, before breakfast, it was filled with old men in praying-shawls and phylacteries, while the rest of the day, until late at night, it was in the possession of card-players.

I wanted to wire Bender to send a message to Fanny, in my name, stating that I had been unavoidably detained in the city, but I lacked the energy to do so. I had not even the energy to extricate myself from the attentions of the pretty mother of the homely girl.

That charity meeting bothered me more than anything else. One was apt to impute my absence to meanness. I pictured Kaplan’s disappointment, and I felt like going to Tannersville for his sake, if for no other reason. The next best thing would have been to have Bender wire my contribution to each of the two funds. But I did not stir.

The hotel-keeper came out to remind me of my train.

“Thank you,” I said, with a smile. “But the weather is too confoundedly good. I’m too lazy to leave your place, Rivesman. You must have ordered this weather on purpose to detain me.”

I was hoping, of course, that my presence in this hotel would be unknown to the Kaplans, for some time at least. Soon, however, something happened which made it inevitable that they should hear of it that very evening.

On Sundays the Jewish summer hotels are usually visited by committees of various philanthropic institutions who go from place to place making speeches and collecting donations. One such committee appeared in the dining-room of the Rigi Kulm at the dinner-hour, which on Sundays was between I and 3. It represented a day nursery, an establishment where the children of the East Side poor are taken care of while their mothers are at work, and it consisted of two men, one of whom was an eloquent young rabbi. As the ecclesiastic took his stand near the piano and began his appeal my heart sank within me. I had once met him at Kaplan’s house, where he was a frequent visitor, and had given him a check. It goes without saying that I had to give him a contribution now and to talk to him. At this I learned, to my consternation, that he was going to Tannersville that very afternoon.