Chapter 16

THE sluggishness, the dull, dead-and-alive feeling, of which Elias had complained to his uncle, seemed to be tightening its hold upon him. From morning to-night, each day, he went about in a state of profound apathy. His customary occupations had lost their power to interest him. His painting he pursued listlessly, getting no pleasure from it, and producing wretched stuff. He would sit at his studio window for hours at a stretch, moping; trying to think of something to do that would cause him a little sensation; wondering what the matter with himself could be; pitying himself from the bottom of his heart. He craved excitement as the toper craves his grog. But there were grog-shops on every corner; he knew of no excitement-shop. The entire emotional side of his nature appeared to have become congealed and unsusceptible. Even his five bodily senses had lost their edge. His food, unless he deluged it with salt and pepper, was vapid, flavorless. The cold water with which he bathed in the morning, felt lukewarm to his skin. Whatsoever his eye looked upon, straightway forfeited all its beauty, all its suggestiveness. He fancied he would enjoy a horse-whipping. It would stir him up, and start his blood to circulating. Already his memory of Christine had begun to grow dim and shadowy, like the memory of a person known only in a dream. His whole acquaintance with her, from first to last, as he reviewed it, seemed unreal and dream-like. As a matter of curiosity, he tried now and then to call up her face and figure; with none but the vaguest, meagerest results. She had gone quite out of his life, and was fading rapidly quite out of his thought. When Sunday came, and the rabbi reminded him of their engagement to dine at the Kochs’, he experienced something almost like a distinct and positive pleasure. These people, at least, with their high-pitched voices and peculiar manners, would afford him a small measure of amusement. He hoped Miss Tillie would be there. Her aggressive crudity, which, a few weeks ago, would have cut him like a knife, would now simply have the effect of an agreeable irritant.

His hope in this respect was not disappointed. The dinner party consisted of precisely the same lot of people whom he had met the other evening, without an addition or a subtraction. When he and the rabbi arrived, they were all assembled in the parlor, forming the circumference of a circle, of which Lester, sprawling upon the carpet, and smiling a smile of beatific inanition, was the center. They were in ecstasies of admiration, which, evidently, they expected the new-comers to share. It was a monstrously fat baby, without any features to speak of; and it had a horrid red eruption all over one side of its face. Yet, very gravely, Mr. Koch asked, “Isn’t that the handsomest baby you ever saw, Mr. Bacharach? Wouldn’t you like to paint his portrait?” And Elias felt constrained to reply that it was, and that he would.

By and by his nurse came, and bore Master Lester away.

Mr. Blum sidled up, and taking Elias by the arm, remarked, “You was an artist-painter, Mr. Bacharach. Come; I show you a work of art.”

He led his victim to the worsted-work enormity above the mantel-piece.

“Hey? What you think of dot?” he inquired, with a connoisseurish smile. “I give dot to my daughter for a birthday present. Dot’s immense, hey? I had it mait to order. Dot coast me a heap of money. How much you think dot coast?”

Elias had no idea. A great deal, he supposed.

“Vail, sir, dot coast me two hundred and fifty dollars, cash down. But it’s worth it. I don’t consider no money wasted, dot’s spent for a work of art.”

Suddenly a look of intense vacancy spread over Mr. Blum’s countenance; which was as suddenly followed by one of liveliest interest. Bringing his forefinger with a swoop down upon Elias’s cravat-pin—a Roman coin, set in a ring of gold—“Excuse me,” he demanded eagerly, “is dot a genuine aintique?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure. I dare say not,” Elias answered, smothering his impulse to laugh.

“Where you bought it?”

Elias told him.

“What you pay for it?”

Elias told him.

“Oh, vail, dot must be an imitation. You couldn’t get no genuine aintique for a price like dot.”

Pretty soon a servant appeared, and announced that dinner was ready.

“Take partners,” Mr. Koch called out.

They went down to the dining-room, and distributed themselves about the table in accordance with the instructions, verbal and gestural, issued by Mrs. Koch. Elias sat between Miss Tillie and Mrs. Blum.

The men covered their heads with their handkerchiefs. There was an instant of silence. Mr. Koch glanced over at the rabbi, nodding significantly; whereupon, in his best voice, the rabbi intoned a grace. The men joined in the amen, which they pronounced omen.

The dinner began with a cocktail, and wound up with a liqueur. There were ten courses, and five kinds of wine. After the French, the Jews are the best cooks in the world; and the present repast fully sustained their reputation. The banqueters sat down at one o’clock. At a quarter to five the gentlemen lit their cigars. It was not until six o’clock that the table was finally deserted.

During the soup not a word was spoken. Everybody devoted himself religiously to his spoon. At last, however, leaning back in his chair, heaving a long-drawn sigh, and wiping the tears of enjoyment from his eyes, Mr. Blum exclaimed fervently: “Ach! Dot was a splendid soup!” And his spouse wagged her jolly old head approvingly at him, from across the table, and gurgled: “Du lieber Gott!”

This was the signal for a general loosening of tongues. A very loud and animated conversation at once broke forth from all directions. It was carried on, for the most part, in something like English; but every now and then it betrayed a tendency to lapse into German.

“Vail,” announced Mr. Blum, with a pathetically reflective air, “when I look around this table, and see all these smiling faces, and smell dot cooking, and drink dot wine—my Gott!—dot reminds me of the day I lainded at the Baittery, forty-five years ago, with just exactly six dollars in my pocket. I didn’t much think then that I’d be here to-day. Hey, Rebecca?”

“Ach, Gott is goot,” Mrs. Blum responded, lifting her hand and casting her eyes toward the ceiling.

“Oh, papa,” murmured Mrs. Koch, with profound emotion, “and you didn’t think you’d be a graindpa, neither, with such a loafly little graind-son, did you?”

“I didn’t think I’d be much of any thing at all, dot’s a faict. I didn’t haif no prospects, and I didn’t haif no friends. If it hadn’t been for my religion, I don’t know what I done. I guess I commit suicide. But I was a good Jew, and I knew the Lord would help me. Then I got married, and dot brought me goot luck. When me and Rebecca got married, I was earning just exactly five dollars a week, as a journeyman tailor. There’s an exaimple for you, Elias Bacharach.”

“Your success has been very remarkable,” observed the rabbi.

“My success—what you think my success has been due to, Elias Bacharach?”

“Oh, to business wisdom—to what they call genius, I suppose.”

“No, sir—no, siree. Nodings of the kind. I owe my success to three things: to my God, my wife, and my industry. I ain’t no smarter than any other man. But all my life I been industrious; and the Lord has given me good health; and my wife has taken care of my earnings. All my life I go to work at six or seven o’clock every morning; and I don’t never leave my work till it can spare me. You aisk my son-in-law. He tell you that I get down-town every morning at seven o’clock; and I don’t go home in the busy season till ten or eleven at night; and I’m sixty-five years old. Dot’s what mait my success. Hey, Rebecca?”

“Ach, Gott!” cried Mrs. Blum. There was a frog in her voice, and her merry little eyes were dim with tears. She turned to Elias, and whispered: “Oh, he’s such a goot man, that man of mine!”

“Elias Bacharach,” pursued Mr. Blum, “you see dot lady there, next to you—my wife? Vail, she’s pretty near as old as I am, and maybe you don’t think she’s very hainsome. But I tell you this. She’s just exactly as hainsome in my eyes to-day, as she was on the day when we got married; and that’s forty years ago already.”

Mrs. Blum was blushing now, peony red; and she cried out, “Oh, go’vay! Shut up!” And all around the table a laugh went, at the fond old couple’s expense.

When sobriety was restored, “I saw by the papers,” said the rabbi, “that the manufacturers of clothing have been having trouble with their workmen, lately—strikes, and that sort of thing. How have you got along with yours?”

“Oh, we—we got along maiknificent,” Mr. Blum replied. “You see my son-in-law over there? He mainage the whole affair. You aisk him.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Koch—when Mr. Koch spoke, he raised his voice, and assumed a declamatory style, as though in fancy he were addressing a public meeting—“Yes, sir, when I saw that other houses were having trouble, I made up my mind to take the bull by the horns. So I called all our men together, and I talked to them up and down. I gave it to them straight. ‘Look at here, boys,’ said I, ‘I want you to understand that the firm of Blum & Koch are not merely your employers; they’re your friends. They’re the best friends you’ve got, and don’t you forget it. They mean to deal fairly and squarely with you in every thing, and they want to be dealt with the same way by you. You have rights, and we mean to recognize and protect your rights. You have interests, and we mean to make your interests our interests. And unless I’m hugely mistaken, we’ve always done it. Well, now, look at here. If you men ain’t contented; if you think you’ve got any grievances; or if there’s any demands you want to make, I’ll tell you what you do. Don’t you come to us as enemies, or strikers; but you just come right up like one friend to another, and you tell us in a friendly way what you want; and I promise you that every thing you ask will be considered, and every thing that’s even fair-to-middling reasonable, will be done for you?’ That’s what I said to the men; and it worked like magic. They gave three cheers for Blum & Koch; and two or three days later they sent a committee with a statement of their claims. Well, sir, the granting of those claims involved a net loss of two per cent, annually on our profits; but we talked it over, and we made up our minds that the harm it would do us, wouldn’t equal the good it would do the men; and so we gave in gracefully. There was one point, though, on which we held off. But we told them our reasons for holding off on that; and after they thought it over, they came and confessed that we were in the right.”

“Would it be indiscreet to ask what that point was?” the rabbi ventured.

“Not at all. It was this. We got a man in our employ—one of our best hands—an Irishman of the name of O’Day—who’s been with us ever since we started manufacturing. You know, when we first went into business, we simply jobbed. We didn’t begin to manufacture till ‘76. Well, that man, O’Day, a year or two ago, he contracted a kind of a nervous disease, which makes it impossible for him to do his work when the other workmen are around. He can work perfectly well alone; but in the room with the others, he gets excited, and loses his head, and can’t take a stitch. At the same time, he’s got a family to support. So we’ve given him a machine, and we allow him to do his work in his own home. Well, sir, the men, they’re dead set against tenement-house labor; and they wanted us to discharge O’Day. We wouldn’t. It struck us as such a dirty mean thing to do, that we made up our minds the Lord would punish us, if we did it. We made up our minds that if we did that, we’d deserve to have bad luck right along. So we told the men we wouldn’t. We told them that we’d rather shut down and go out of the trade, than discharge O’Day—which was the fact. We said we’d always been a prosperous house; and that we believed we owed our prosperity chiefly to the fact that we’d never done any thing to offend the Lord. We said that right out. And we said also that if any other man in our employ should get in the same box, we’d treat him the same way. Well, as I say, the men, they thought it over, and they concluded that we were in the right.”

“Yes, sir,” added Mr. Blum, “we believe in treating our hands like feller-beings. I was a hand myself, already. Dot’s a great advaintage. We don’t go on the American plan, and treat them like machines.”

“Now, don’t you get started on that subject,” cried Mr. Koch. “There’s nothing he’s so prejudiced about, as every thing American. I’m an Americain We’re all Americans. The Americans are the grandest people on the face of the earth.”

“I don’t see how you make dot out,” retorted Mr. Blum.

“Well, I’ll tell you how I make it out. I make it out this way. But first, you just hold on. Let’s see how you make it out. What do you judge the Americans from? What do you know about them, anyhow? Why, you meet a few of them downtown; and you’re prejudiced against them, to begin with, because they’re Christians; and they’re prejudiced against you, because you’re a Jew; and you and they don’t understand each other, and don’t get on together; and the consequence is, your mutual prejudices are simply intensified. Well, now, that ain’t a fair way to judge a people. I’ll leave it to Dr. Gedaza if it is. The right way is, not to take individuals, but to take public sentiment. Public sentiment, that is to say, the feeling of the people in general on questions of importance—that’s the real index of a people’s character, And there ain’t another country in the world, where public sentiment is so high as it is right here in the United States of America.”

“In what respects?” questioned the rabbi.

Mrs. Koch put in: “You needn’t scream so, Washington. We ain’t none of us daif.” But her husband didn’t hear her.

“In what respects?” he shouted, swelling with emotion. “Why, in—in every respect—on every question of honor and decency and morality. Here’s a simple example. You go to Europe—you go to London, Berlin, Paris—I don’t care which—and you notice the way the drivers beat their horses in the public streets; and nobody thinks any thing of it, nor dreams of interfering. If they tried to do it here, in New York, they’d be mobbed in no time. Well, that may seem a trifle; but it ain’t a trifle. No, sir. For it points to a radical defect in the European character, and to a positive virtue in the American. It’s the sense of fair play—that’s what it is. Don’t abuse a creature, simply because he’s defenseless and you’ve got the upper hand. Do you see? Then take the American way of treating women. You let a respectable young girl, provided she’s good-looking—you let Tillie, there—go out alone in Paris or Berlin, and when she gets back, you ask her whether she’s been stared at, or insulted. But you let her go out here. Why, she could travel alone from New York to San Francisco, and not run a risk. Then take morality and decency. And take the American way of doing business—the big, generous scale on which every thing is done, and the sense of honor among business men. They’re sharp and close, I admit, but they mean what they say every time. I tell you, it’s grand, it’s beautiful; it does me good every time I think of it. I go to Europe every two or three years on business; and I get a chance of comparing. It makes me sick, the depravity, the corruption, and the stinginess, you meet everywhere over there.”

The orator sank back in his chair, panting, and absent-mindedly mopped his brow with his napkin.

“Vail, dot’s pretty good,” cried Mr. Blum, with cutting irony, “and what you say of them big American bank swindlers, hey? They do things on a generous scale, don’t they?”

“That’s no argument,” replied his son-in-law. “That don’t signify any thing. If you want to argue, you just answer me this. If you think America’s such a poor sort of a place, what did you come here for, any way?”

“Oh, I came because I didn’t have no money; and I got an idea the streets here was paved with gold.”

“Well, now that you’ve got money, and now that you know the streets here ain’t paved with gold, why don’t you go back?”

“Oh, dot—dot is another question.”

“Well, I’ll tell you why. Because you like it here, Because, down deep, you think it’s the finest country in the world. You talk against it, for the love of talking. If you went to Europe, you’d be as homesick as anybody.”

“Ain’t my uncle a splendid conversationalist?’’ Tillie whispered to Elias.

“Washington,” said his father-in-law, solemnly, “you got a head on you like Daniel Webster’s.”

“Oh, papa!” cried Mrs. Koch. “You make me die with laifing.”

Mrs. Blum was rocking from side to side in her chair, and murmuring, “Gott! Gott! Gott!”

For a while, again, there was silence; which, again, by and by, Mr. Blum was the first to break.

“Sarah,” he declared, addressing his daughter, “them pickles is simply graind.”

“I opened a new jar to-day, papa,” Mrs. Koch returned.

“Elias Bacharach,” the old gentleman continued, “what you think of them pickles?”

“They’re delicious,” Elias said.

“Vail, sir, my daughter, she make them herself. I think she make the best pickles going.”

“Oh, papa,” protested Mrs. Koch, blushing. “How can you say dot, when Aintoinette Morgenthau is seated right next to you? Her pickles beat mine all hollow.”

“No,” cried Mrs. Morgenthau, magnanimously; “he’s right. You’re the boss.”

“Vail,” pursued Mr. Blum, judicially, “there is a difference. Aintoinette’s pickles is splendid—dot’s a faict. Maybe their flavor is just exactly as good as yours. But yours is crisper. My Gott! when I put one of your pickles in my mouth, dot makes me feel said. I never taste no pickles so crisp as them, since I was a little boy in Chairmany, and ate my mamma’s. Her pickles—oh, they was loafly, they was maiknificent.”

“Ach, papa! You got so much zendimend!” his daughter exclaimed, with deep sympathy.

“You ought to taste my mamma’s pickles,” Tillie whispered to Elias. “Of course, Mr. Blum is prejudiced in favor of his daughter’s.”

“Been to the theater lately, Mr. Bacharach?” Mr. Koch called out.

“No,” said Elias, little foreseeing the effect of his announcement; “I don’t go to the theater much. I’m not very fond of it.”

Immediately, from all directions, there was an outburst of astonishment and indignation; for in New York the theater has no patrons more ardent or devoted than the-German Jews.

“Oh, Mr. Bacharach!”

“How can you say such a thing?”

“Gott in Himmel!”

“Oh, you don’t mean it!”

“Vail, if I aifer!”

And so forth, till the poor fellow was blushing to the roots of his hair, and would have liked to bite his tongue out. Mr. Koch took up the cudgels in his behalf.

“Oh, come,” he shouted, “don’t make Mr. Bacharach feel as though he’d brought the Tower of Babel crashing around his ears. He’s got a right to his opinion, hasn’t he? I understand the way he feels. In fact, I feel about the same way, myself. I go to the theater a good deal, I don’t deny; but that’s because there’s nothing else to do. When I get home at night I’m fagged out, and I want a little amusement, and I take my wife and go to the theater. But all the same, I’m free to say that the theaters here in this town are about as poor as they can make them, and no mistake. Melodrama and burlesque—that’s what they give you. Good, honest pictures of life—where’ll you find them, I’d like to know? Now and then you get a big star—Salvini or Booth; now and then you get an old English comedy; but it’s the average that I’m talking about, and I defy any man to say any thing in defense of that. You folks, you go to the theater, the same as I do, because you haven’t got any thing else to do. But an intellectual young fellow like Mr. Bacharach, he don’t need any outside amusements of that sort. He’d rather stay home, and think; wouldn’t you, Mr. Bacharach?”

“Washington,” said Mr. Blum, “you’re talking about American theayters. But what you got against the Chairman theayter—the Thalia—hey?”

“Oh, you go ‘way. You want to get back to our old quarrel,” Mr. Koch retorted. “No, thanks.”

“Sarah,” said her father, abruptly, “there’s one of your adopted children—my grainchild, consequently,” he added, winking humorously at Elias.

He pointed toward the open window, at which appeared the red and weather-beaten visage of an elderly tramp. The tramp was peering in through the iron bars, and muttering an inarticulate, plaintive prayer—presumably for “cold victuals.” Mrs. Koch glanced over her shoulders at him, and then, addressing a hasty “Excuse me,” to the company, got up and left the room.

“She’s got about twenty of them fellers,” Mr. Blum informed Elias, “who she tries to be a mudder for. She feeds them, and clothes them, and gives them free lectures. They’re coming all the time. We don’t never sit down to a meal, but one of them sticks his head in the winder. Now, you just listen.”

Out in the area, Mrs. Koch’s high-pitched voice could be heard earnestly speaking as follows:

“Oh, you baid man! You told me you wouldn’t touch another drop of liquor this week! And now I see you been indoxicated! You smell perfectly outracheous; and dot loafly coat I give you, all spoiled! I got a great mind to send you away, and naifer do nothing for you any more.”

A dull reverberation, like the far-distant roll of muffled drums, testified that the tramp was pleading in his defense. After which, Mrs. Koch went on: “Vail, you promise you don’t drink another glaiss of liquor till next Sunday, hey? You cross your heart, and promise? All right. Then, you take this. And bright and early, to-morrow morning, you come around here, and I give you a job. I want my cellar to be cleaned out.”

“She makes them fellers say they’ll come around to-morrow morning, every time she sees them; but they don’t never come,” Mr. Blum announced. “She’s keeping dot cellar dirty just on purpose, so dot some time she can give the chop to one of them good-for-nodings. I guess I clean it out myself, if dot goes on much longer.—Hey! Hold on, there!” he cried, with sudden excitement. He ran to the window; stopped the tramp, who was in process of departure; and deposited a twenty-five-cent silver piece in his grimy palm. Returning to his seat, he appeared quite oblivious to the laughter at his expense, in which the others were indulging.

“You want to kill that old fellow, don’t you?” Mr. Koch demanded. “Giving him a quarter! Why, it will bring on an attack of delirium tremens.”

“Dot’s all right,” Mr. Blum replied. “I know how it is myself. I was pretty near to being a traimp myself, one time, already. Hey, Rebecca?”

“Du bist ein Engel—ja wohl!—ein himmlischer, wunderschoener Engel!” cried his wife, her broad face beaming like a harvest moon. Then she whispered to Elias, “Ach! He is so loafly, dot Meester Blum!” and kept swaying her head, and smiling to herself, for the next ten minutes.

With the coffee, the gentlemen lighted their cigars, and, leaving their respective places, gathered in a knot at one end of the table, where they began vociferously to exchange their views upon the state of trade. The ladies assembled at the other end, and discoursed of topics maternal and domestic. Lester was produced, and trotted upon his grandmother’s lap, while his “points” were mooted and admired for the thousandth time. Finally, the men again covered their heads; and the rabbi chanted his grace after meat. Then Mr. Koch proposed that the company should ascend to the parlor, and listen to some music. In the parlor the gentlemen lighted fresh cigars; and Miss Tillie seated herself at the piano.

She played the second Hungarian Rhapsody, and the Allegro Appassionato from the Moonlight Sonata, and Chopin’s Funeral March, and she played them all marvelously well. Her technic was exact and brilliant; her feeling was ardent, intelligent and refined. For an hour she flooded the room with bewitching harmonies, and held every heart there spellbound. Elias, whose chief sentiment for her, a short while ago, had been one of half contemptuous amusement, felt an emotion very like genuine respect begin to stir within his bosom. It astonished him, it awed him a little, to find that a young lady who, in the commoner relations of life, appeared so crude and so prosaic, was possessed of such superb and consummate genius for a noble art. “There must be something in her, after all,” he thought. She, perhaps, divined what was going on in his mind; for, when he had finished complimenting her upon her performance, she said, in a subdued voice, and with a gentler air than her usual one, “I know, Mr. Bacharach, that I’m not very much in conversation; but when I sit down at the piano, it seems as though somehow I was another girl, and a great deal nicer one; and I feel things that I don’t ever feel anywhere else. I guess maybe music’s my natural method of expression.”

“Now, Mr. Bacharach,” Mr. Koch said, when Elias and the rabbi were taking their leave, “don’t treat us like strangers. drop in on us any evening, or to dinner any Sunday afternoon. We’ll always be glad to see you.”

“Yes; come over often,” added Mrs. Koch. “Come just exactly as if you was to home.”