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(Gilbert Wolf) Gabriel
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Title: The Seven-Branched Candlestick
The Schooldays of Young American Jew
Author: Gilbert W. (Gilbert Wolf) Gabriel
Release Date: September 22, 2010 [eBook #33793]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
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THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK
The Schooldays of Young American Jew
by
GILBERT W. GABRIEL
New York
Bloch Publishing Company, Inc.
"The Jewish Book Concern"
1925
Copyright, 1917
Bloch Publishing Company
CONTENTS
I. BY WAY OF PROLOGUE 5
II. IN THE BEGINNING 16
III. FRIDAY NIGHT 25
IV. THE BOY AND THE SCHOOL 34
V. THE MILITARY ACADEMY 42
VI. MY STEERFORTH 51
VII. FRESHMAN YEAR 61
VIII. WITHIN THE GATES 70
IX. MY AUNT AND I 79
X. THE RULES OF THE GAME 88
XI. A MAN'S WORK 98
XII. THE HEART OF JUDEA 107
XIII. CHILD AND PARENT 116
XIV. AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW 125
XV. COLLEGE LIFE 135
XVI. THE HUN'S INVASION 144
XVII. MANY IMPULSES 154
XVIII. I STAND--BUT NOT ASIDE 163
XIX. "BATTLE ROYAL" 172
XX. THE CANDLES ARE LIGHTED 181
The Seven-Branched Candlestick
I
BY WAY OF PROLOGUE
"Years of Plenty" was the name an Englishman recently gave to a book of
his school days. My own years of secondary school and college were
different from his, by far, but no less full.
I shall only say by way of preface that they numbered seven. There were
two of them at high school, one at a military school on the Hudson, and
four at our city's university.
Seven in all. Because they were not altogether happy, I have no right to
think of them as lean years. For each one of them meant much to
me--means as much now as I look back and am chastened and strengthened
by their memory. Each is as a lighted candle in the dark of the past
that I look back upon. And I like to imagine that, since there are seven
of them, they are in the seven-branched candlestick which is so stately
and so reverent a symbol of my Faith.
For it was my school days which gave me that Faith.
Born a Jew, I was not one. And this I can blame on no person excepting
myself. Before my parents' death, they had urged me, pleaded with me to
go to Sunday school at our reformed synagogue, to attend the Saturday
morning services, to study the lore, that I might be confirmed into the
religion of my fathers. That they did not absolutely insist upon it was
because they wanted me to come to my God gratefully, voluntarily,
considering his worship an exercise of love, of gladness, and not a task
of impatient duty. I know that it must have grieved them--I know it now,
even if I only half-guessed it then in that distorted but instinctive
way that boys do guess things--and yet they said little to me of it.
Once or twice a year they took me with them to a Friday night service. I
was too young, perhaps. I am willing to use my youth as an excuse for my
falling asleep, or for my sitting uneasily, squirming, yawning,
heavy-eyed, uninterested, unmoved ... hungry only to be out into the
streets again, and back in my own room at home, with my copy of
"Pilgrim's Progress," or "The Talisman," between my knees.
At best, I can excuse myself only because I lived in a neighborhood
distinctly Christian. It was on one of those old, quiet streets of the
Columbia Heights section of Brooklyn that our house stood. There was a
priggish sedateness to it. There was much talk on either hand of
"family": the Brooklyn people--of that neighborhood, anyhow--seem to set
much stock by their early settling ancestors. Near our house was a
preparatory school for girls and another for boys; they were hotbeds of
snobbery and prejudice, these schools. The students who attended them
had to pass down our block on their way home from school. Often, when
they saw me playing there, some of them would stop and make fun of me
and tease me with remarks about the Jews. I was a boy without much
spirit. I always resented the taunts--but I always lacked the courage to
call back ... and if my eyes did blaze involuntarily with anger, I
usually turned away so that these bigger boys should not be able to see
them.
My fear was behind it all. I was afraid to fight back. And, being
ashamed of my cowardice, I grew quickly ashamed of that which had proved
it. I grew ashamed of being a Jew.
Terribly, bitterly ashamed. So mortified, indeed, that it was more than
I could do to speak of it to my father. And, usually, I could talk of
anything to him. Once he himself mentioned it to me: asked me whether I
was not proud of my race, whether I could not look with true contempt
and easy forgiveness upon those rowdies who had taunted me. I tried to
take that attitude ... but I was not big and strong enough for it. I
tried it only once--and then one of the big bullies of that fashionable
preparatory school, on his way down the block, grew angry at my lordly
unconcern towards his teasing, and hit me with his fist, and cut my lip
open. I kicked him in the shins, I remember, and ran swiftly away.
That didn't help matters. I was as much a weakling as ever. When I went
to public school, I used to cry with a snivelling vexation because the
toughs of my class made fun of me. One of them had a little sister in
the class below us, and I was very fond of her. I remember how, on St.
Valentine's day, I stole into her class room at lunch time and, while
she was absent, stuck a lacy, gaudy and beribboned missive in her desk.
I didn't understand, then, why the teacher tittered so nervously when I
asked her permission to do it. But, when my own lunch was done, and I
was back at my desk, I lifted the lid of it only to find that same
valentine rammed into one corner, crushed and torn almost in half, and
scrawled with the word, "Sheeny!"
Nor did the little romantic flight end there. For the next day, after
sister and brother had been comparing notes, the former marched
straight up to me, pulled my nose, and warned me to keep away, once and
for all, from the true American daughter of a true American family, and
to confine my sentiments to "some little Jew girl!"
I knew none of that sort. What few boys and girls of my own race I had
met at playtime or at Sunday school, I purposely shunned. I thought, if
I went in their company, I should be inviting persecution. I thought my
only way to escape this was to escape all Jewish comrades ... to deny my
religion, if possible. I was so utterly ashamed of it!
Thus I went, with all of a child's fear and a child's cowardice, into
those days which were to mean so much to me. Had I had the pride, the
devotion to my religion which is a Jewish heritage, those days would
have meant less. Less in sorrow and bewilderment, that is, and
infinitely more in the building up of my character.
There are those who go stolidly, brusquely through life without ever
needing the comfort of religion. And there are those, like me, who lack
the self-reliance ... who cannot be content with a confessed
agnosticism, but who must take faith and strength from those rites and
codes which satisfy their sense of the mystically sublime. Now that I am
grown to man's estate I can know these things of myself--but how could
I know it then? How could a romping, light-hearted boy who cared more
for baseball and "Ivanhoe" than for anything else in the world
recognize, then, his own needs and cravings?
It was only after those few black, frightful days were over that I
realized that something was lacking in my life. But even then I did not
know what it was. I only felt the sharply personal loss, the inevitable
loneliness and helplessness ... and had not learned in what direction to
lift my eyes, to reach up my arms to ask for spiritual succor.
Those days were the ones in which my parents left me. My father was
killed in a railroad accident. My mother, about to give birth to another
child, was in bed at the time when the news was brought to her. She
never rose again. The shock killed her.
I remember that the funeral services were conducted by the rabbi of our
synagogue. They were according to the Jewish ritual, and I thought them
dull and unmeaning. They expressed for me none of the sorrow that I
felt. The Hebrew that was in them was mockery and gibberish to me. I am
afraid I was glad when it was over, and I was alone with my aunt with
whom I was to live.
This aunt, Selina Haberman, was a widow. Her husband had been a devout
Jew of the most orthodox type. She used to tell me with great amusement
how he would say his prayers each morning with his shawl and
phylacteries upon him, with his head bowed and a look of joyous devotion
on his face. She said she never could understand how a man, as educated
and broadminded as he was, could have had so simple and unquestioning a
loyalty to these worn old costumes of the past. But she said wistfully
that she thought he had died a much happier man because of his religion
... and that was what was hardest of all for her to understand.
Aunt Selina herself was a Christian. She put as little stock in
Christian Science, though, as in Judaism. It was a fad for her, and an
escape from the hindrances which connection with the Jewish faith would
have entailed. I think she had an idea that people would forget she had
ever been a Jewess and would accept her for a Christian without her
having to go through the extremer forms of proselytism. Like me, she
lacked spirit for either one thing or the other. Like me, she dreaded to
be classed among her own people. But in this we were unlike: that her
dread amounted to a vindictive and brutal antagonism towards whatever
and whoever smacked of Jewry. I think she even objected to adopting me
for a while, because my name was a distinctly Jewish one, and because it
would leave no doubt in her neighbor's eyes as to my race--and hence, no
doubt as to hers.
Aunt Selina lived on Central Park West in the City. She was full of
social ambitions. She had a good many friends from among the
intellectuals of Washington square: Christians, of course, most of them.
Her closest companion was a Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, who claimed to be a
Theosophist. Born with the name of Cohen, she had married a Mr. Fleming
who had made necessary, by his conduct, an early divorce. My aunt, Mrs.
Haberman, and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen lunched together very often, and I
suspect they had a tacit but inviolable agreement never to mention to
each other that bond of race and religion which, stronger than their
professed tastes, drew them instinctively together.
My life in Aunt Selina's apartment was a lonely one. She was hardly the
sort of woman to whom young folks would go for sympathy. She did not
mistreat me, of course, but left me entirely to my own devious ways. For
the ways of a boy of fourteen--especially of an orphan of somewhat shy
and melancholic disposition--are bound to be devious.
I had much to fight out with myself. I lacked any help from the
outside--and though I won over my impulses, my doubts and inner
conflicts, the struggle left me a weak, shy, shunning boy.
For the first year of my life with Aunt Selina I went to a nearby public
school. There were a good many Jewish boys in my class--many more than
there had been in the whole Brooklyn school--but I kept away from them
as a matter of course. I made a few friends among the Gentiles--not
many, because they were hard to make, and I could always feel, in my
supersensitive fashion, that they were fashioning a sort of favor out of
conferring their friendship upon me.
"It will be different when I am in high school," I told myself. "It will
be different because I myself shall be different. The boys will be older
there, will be more sensible and broadminded, and I shall be less
nervous about the difference between us!"
The difference ... I did not know what it was, but I felt it all the
time. I tried to hide it, to disregard it--but I knew that it was there,
in my blood, in my face, in my name ... and it held me apart from my
class as if it had been a shame and a lasting disgrace.
So it was that I looked forward more and more eagerly for the change and
liberation which I thought high school would bring me. Half a year, two
months, a month ... then only a few days ... and then it was over. My
public schools days were past. I had graduated into high school with
high honors and with an equally high hatred of whatever was Jewish.
If Aunt Selina had been different ... but no, I am not going to blame it
on anyone excepting myself.
The summer after I graduated from public school I went with Aunt Selina
and her friend, Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, to a hotel in the White Mountains.
It was one of those hotels where Jews are not welcome. The management,
if I am not mistaken, had not been able to impress Aunt Selina with that
fact. They were constantly raising the price of our rooms, but the two
ladies seemed content to keep on paying what was asked for the rare
privilege of dwelling in forbidden places.
It was certainly not a pleasant summer. The other guests snubbed us
continually, left us to our own devices. I used to have to go walking
every morning and sit on the porch every afternoon in the company of the
two ladies ... because there was no one else for me to go with. For even
among the children there was a rigorous boycotting--and I was the
sufferer for it. It made me very melancholy; not indignant, of course,
because at that time I lacked entirely the spirit to be indignant--just
melancholy, and hateful to myself, spiteful to my aunt, ashamed of the
things I should have gloried in, hating the things I should have
worshiped.
Well, I told myself, it would all be different in the fall: it would all
be different when I was at high school. For then I was to begin those
seven years which were to be my real education. So far it had been
naught but childhood's prologue. And what a shabby little part I had
played in it!
But I did not know that, then!
II
IN THE BEGINNING
Immediately upon our return from the mountains I entered high school. My
aunt did her duty by accompanying me to the office of the principal and
assuring him that I was an honest and upright boy, aged fourteen.
It had been her ambition to have me attend one of the fashionable
boarding schools in Connecticut. I do not think she had me much in mind
when she made the attempt to enroll me at the St. Gregory Episcopalian
Institute. She told so many of her friends of this intention--and told
them it with such an evident pride--that I fear she was more concerned
with her own social prestige than with my education. And when St.
Gregory, through a personal visit from its headmaster, discovered that
Mrs. Haberman had no right to aspire to the exquisite preference which
God accords Episcopalians, and later sent us a polite but cursory letter
of regret that its roster's capacity was full for the year, she bore it
as a direct insult upon her ancestors. (Though, of course, even so sharp
a hurt to her pride would not let her admit openly that all of those
ancestors were Jews.)
At any rate, I went to the high school as a sort of a last resort. My
aunt dreaded the company I might have to keep there--all the public
riffraff, she called it. That was really why she accompanied me, that
first day, to assure herself that I was going to be placed among a
"perfectly horrid set of rude ruffians--ghetto boys, and the like!" and
to have something tangible and definite to worry about during the next
few years.
The principal, busy with the hundred details of school's opening, gave
us as much time and courtesy as he could afford. As I look back upon it,
I think he was remarkably patient with my aunt.
She told him her fears in a fretful, supercilious way; it was in exactly
the same tone that she ordered things from the butcher and grocer each
morning over the telephone. The principal heard her through--in fact,
prompted her whenever she faltered, nodded appreciatively when something
she said was most flagrantly out of place. When she was finished, he
turned to look very steadily at me.
"If you have such objections to the class of boys in a public high
school, why do you send your nephew here?" he asked.
"Because it--it is convenient," she stammered.
"I must confess, I wanted him to go to a boarding-school."
"Which one?"
"St. Gregory Episcopalian Institute."
The principal's mouth quivered with the smile he could hardly suppress:
"Episcopalian? The boy is a Jew, is he not?"
Mrs. Haberman sat up very straight. "His parents had Jewish
affiliations, I believe. They are both dead."
"I see." And I am sure he really did see! For a moment later he put a
deft end to the interview.
"Madam," he said, "this boy must take his chances like any other boy in
the school. He must make his own friends from among his own sort. He
must fight his own adversaries among those who are unlike him. That is
the law of life as well as of every school. If he is attracted to the
undesirable element, he would find it and mingle with it at St.
Gregory's as quickly as he would here. I have a fine lot of youths here.
I am proud of them--even of those who fail to come up to the standards.
I won't try to talk to you about the splendid spirit of
democracy--because you evidently don't want the boy to be democratic.
You don't want him to stand on his own merits as a Jew. If he did that,
he would be putting up an honest, spirited battle. I only know that all
men and all boys like an honest stand and a fair fight for the things
worth protecting. I know that if I were a Jew, I should never--well,
that's your business, not mine." He took out of his desk a little
leather-covered book. "It may interest you to know that this high school
is ranked very high scholastically." He turned the pages. "Also that the
St. Gregory Institution is ranked among the most unsuccessful schools in
the country in the matter of scholarship." He showed her a table of
figures, then closed the book and put it away, smiling. "Also," he
finished, "that I am an Episcopalian, and that I should rather send a
son or a nephew of mine to prison than to so harmful a place as St.
Gregory."
His remarks did not altogether convince my aunt, of course; and he said
no more, except to assure her that he would follow my course in his
school with much interest, and would do all in his power to make me
manly. To Mrs. Haberman, the promise to make a man of me meant little.
She left me at the school door, stepping gingerly across the pavement
into her limousine in order to escape the contamination of a group of
young Italians who were coming up the steps. As she slammed the machine
door and was driven away, I felt somewhat bewildered--very much alone
in a hallway of hundreds of boys whom I did not know, but who jostled
me, went by me, up and down the stairs with a great hollow stamping of
feet, an echoing laughter, a loud excitement of regathering after the
summer's recess. None of them paid the slightest attention to me.
A deep-voiced gong sounded through the hall and up the wide stair-well.
It was the signal to disperse to our classrooms.
I had a card in my hand, assigning me to room 7 on the third floor. I
climbed the stairs fearfully, my heart beating faster than usual, my
knees trembling a little. I was entering a strange and mystic land that
I had dreamed of, yet had never seen.
Room 7, third floor. It was a big, bare room, void of almost everything
excepting sunshine. There were desks, low and set decently apart. Along
the wall, behind gleaming glass, were cases of seashells and botanical
specimens. The teacher's desk, at the further end, was on a small,
shabby dais. Only a few of the boys had arrived, and the big room rang
with the echo of unfilled space.
I heard them telling each other what they had been doing over the
summer. One of them, brown and sturdy, was telling of Maine and the camp
he had attended there. Another, in ragged clothes, and of a thin, pale
face, spoke of the heated city during July and August, and of how he
had been swimming when he could get away from his summer job--swimming
in the East River. It shocked me to hear that. I had a picture of the
East River as I had seen it from the Brooklyn Bridge, a brown, littered
flood, choked with scurrying tugboats and the floating trails of refuse.
I hated that boy for a long while after I heard his story. But he had a
sharp, kindly face, and I wondered to see how popular he was with those
who knew him.
Coming, as I did, from a distant grammar school, it chanced that there
were no boys of my acquaintance in the classroom. I was absolutely
alone--a stranger to them all.
The teacher, on his dais, tapped with thin, white knuckles against the
side of his desk. He was a little, timid man with one of the saddest
faces I have ever seen. Mr. Levi, he said his name was.
The boy next to me stirred in his seat. "A Jew for a teacher! What do
you think of that!" he said to me. "A Jew for--" Then he stopped short
and looked at me. "Oh, gee! You're one yourself, ain't you?"
I felt my face grow very hot. I thought of the words which the principal
had only just spoken.... Could I stand up and fight like a man?
I wanted to--I really do believe that I wanted to. But somehow the
impulse that came to me to face this seatmate squarely and to tell him
that--yes, I was a Jew, too--and proud of it--dwindled away into a gulp
and a whimper and a sickly smile.
This other boy was red-headed, freckled. He was very tall, but I saw a
crutch at his side. Later on, when he rose, I could see that he was very
lame; also that around his neck (for he wore no collar) was a little
leather thong and tab. I did not know then--and I did not learn for many
months--that it was the scapular of a Roman Catholic.
He looked at me surlily, but laughing.
"You _are_ a Jew, ain't you?" he demanded.
I hung my head, wondering how to evade the directness of the question.
The lame boy seemed to be waiting for my reply.
"Well, no--not exactly." I stuttered. But I could feel my face flushing
again.
"What d'yer mean, not exactly? What's yer mom and pop?"
"My mother and father? They are dead."
That did not seem to check him. "Well, if you ain't a Jew, you look like
one. You look more like one than the teacher does." Whereupon, much to
my relief, he branched off the subject. "He don't seem to be such a bad
fellow, even with a name like Levi. Oi, oi, oi, Levi!" And he chuckled
with delight at the thought of how he would annoy and tease this teacher
at some future date.
There are some boys of whom we can know at a glance that they are
bullies and mischief makers. This boy, whose name was Geoghen, was one
of them. He used his very lameness as an excuse to boss and bully his
classmates. He was very strong, though as I was to learn only too
soon--and his size made him an undisputed leader.
There were no lessons this first day. There were only a speech of
welcome from the teacher, and an assignment of home work for the next
morning.
But when we were dismissed and had started for the door, Geoghen limped
up to me.
"So you ain't a Jew, eh?" he chuckled, looking hard into my face.
So as to avoid the retort, I fled from him, down the stairs into the
main hall. I was just about to gain the street when the principal,
coming out of his office, saw me.
"What's this?" he said in his deep likable voice. "Running away so
soon?"
"Yes, sir. We're dismissed for today."
"Oh, I see. Well, I suppose you've already begun to fight like a man,
haven't you? I hope so."
"Oh, yes, sir!"
But, as I went, I knew in my heart that it was not true. The whole first
day had been false.
III
FRIDAY NIGHT
Those first days at high school seemed terrible in the intensity of new
experiences. Had I but had my parents to encourage me, perhaps I should
not have felt so bitterly the loneliness of this new turn in the road.
I do not care how manly and resolute he is, a boy will always need the
kind words, the clasp and kiss which only his parents can give him. And
I was not half so resolute then, nor half so hardened to battle as I am
now.
I worried a good deal about my standing in the class room. It seemed to
me that I could not possibly pass each day's recitations creditably. And
yet I did, as I remember. It was only that I so sorely lacked
self-confidence.
My aunt, Mrs. Haberman, did her duty in taking me to a nerve specialist.
He charged her a pretty price to examine me and to assure her that,
physically, there was nothing wrong with me.
"Mentally, he is a little too active," was his sentence upon me. "And
that is what makes him melancholy. Let him study, let him get out and
meet boys of his own age.... Let him find something to be proud of, to
be interested in."
My aunt gave this last a few pettish, impatient moments of thought.
After the doctor was gone, and she and I sat opposite each other at the
table, where the glass and silver made so ostentatious a showing, she
did her best to be practical about it.
"Now, dear, let's see," she pondered, her long white fingers stroking
the table cloth, "I'm sure we can find something to interest and amuse
you, dear. How about basket weaving? or coloring photographs or
something artistic like that?"
I wasn't very polite in my refusals. I declined basket weaving and
coloring photographs and even balked at the idea of installing a
billiard table in our apartment--which seemed to relieve Mrs. Haberman
immensely, since she considered billiards a brutal and vulgar game.
All her suggestions came to naught. Once she spoke of religion, but her
eyes fluttered and she changed the subject quickly, as if she had
accidently hit upon the truth and found it unpleasant. It was enough to
put an idea into my head.
I did not know then, but I do now, that the thing I needed was Faith. A
boy needs it--needs it as much as he needs his parents--and I had
neither one nor the other.
The days retreating into a gloomy background of autumn chills and fogs,
left me thoroughly weakened in spirit. Oftentimes--I could not guess
why--I came home from high school so exhausted that I could only throw
myself upon my bed, behind a locked door, and sob and sigh and shiver as
if with the ague. Everything that had happened during the day would come
pouring back into my memory with a distorted clarity, tinctured with
despair, hopelessly sombred with a boy's sense of wrong and persecution.
I did actually have enough to contend with at high school. I had begun
to feel the racial distinctions, the thoughtless slurs and boycottings
which Jewish lads must everywhere encounter. I tried to tell myself that
it didn't matter--that these were only rough, ill-bred boys to whom I
ought not lower myself to pay attention. But a boy of fourteen finds it
hard to argue himself into bravery, and I failed miserably, ridiculously
at the task. Years later, I was to learn that it was all natural--that I
was passing, as every boy must pass, through the difficult period of
adolescence. It was mostly that I was lonely, balked by the
unappreciative attitude of my aunt, without guidance or curb.
If in all this personal recital I am harsh to the memory of my aunt, you
will perhaps see that I have the right. I am grateful, truly grateful,
for all that she attempted to do for me, but I know that all her care
was misdirected. It was, besides, cruelly lacking in all of the finer
things which should have been mine; things which my parents would have
given me, things that, in my aggravated state, I needed.
Once I was asked by some other Jewish boys at high school to join a
little club which they were forming. I hesitated about it. They were
jolly, healthy boys--most of them from the poorer sections of the
city--who went up to Van Cortlandt Park on Saturday afternoons and
Sundays to play ball or to skate. It would have done me good to be one
of them, to join their sports and laughter--and yet....
Well, my aunt did not approve. I knew she wouldn't, long before I asked
her. If I was the least bit undecided before, she gave me clearly to
understand that companionship with Jewish boys would not be right for
me; that I must avoid this stigma of Judaism as I would avoid a crime.
She said it was for my _own_ good--but I cannot believe it very
heartily. She was trying at that time to make me join a dancing class of
Gentile boys and girls. She told me she thought their company would
counteract the effect of having to endure a high school's rabble.
There came a night, after a day of niggardly discouragements, when the
strange moroseness seemed too heavy to bear. I told my aunt that I did
not want any supper--a fact which did not worry her too much, since she
was in a hurry to dress and go off to a studio party of some silly sort.
And when she was gone and I was alone in the apartment, I could not read
or rest or do anything. I tried to study my next day's lessons, but had
to give them up.
And at last I put on my hat and coat and went down to the street. The
air was bracing, but I was not used to the streets at night--and a
white, wraith-like fog was beginning to seep up from the pavements and
cluster in misty, yellow patches around the lamp-lights.
Shivering, I went on. I did not know where I was bound. The old, savage
loneliness--here in the open, where the dampness brought the scent of
withered grass and lean, bare trees--was sharper, more embittering than
ever.
I went across the street and into the nearest entrance of Central Park.
The quietness of everything there frightened me, called up every
foolish, childhood fear and superstition. I went through dark lanes that
were branched over with creaking branches. I saw the lake, black, cold,
with the stippled reflections of shore lights shining up from its edges.
I felt the moist, chilly wind that came across the big lawns and struck
my face and chest and shoulders. I felt--I could not help but feel that
I must go on, go on and on--in search of I know not what.
I came at length to the Fifth Avenue side of the park. The huge white
stone and marble houses that flanked the street beyond were half lost in
the mist. The automobiles that went up and down the pavements, which
were wet and shining like the backs of seals, made no noise--went
silently, mystically, sweeping blurred trails of light upon the
sidewalks as they passed.
Against that white, low horizon of houses I saw one thing that loomed
dark and gropingly conspicuous.
I did not know what it was. Not then. But it held my attention: the
darkness, the gray curve of it against the sky. There was something
about it that was forbidding, deep, sombre. The lower front of it seemed
to be arched and pillared--and under each arch the shadows were
impenetrably black.
There were automobiles waiting in front of it, at the sidewalk's edge. A
long string of them, too, as if many persons were within upon some
mysterious business.
Then, softly, as if from far distant recesses, there came from within
the soft, resonant voice of an organ--playing.
Was it a church?
Then I remembered that it was Friday night--and I knew that this was a
synagogue--a temple of the Jewish Faith.
At first realization, I moved a little away from it, down the street. A
synagogue--and all that it brought to my mind was the memory of my
parents. In former years they had been wont to take me with them when
they went on Friday nights. And those had been dull, wearisome nights
for me--but I had spent them at my parent's side. So that now, in the
shadow of God's house, my loneliness for them came back to me in wild
deluge, breaking the dam of reserve and doubts and petty limitations.
The music of the organ swelled louder, richer, blending all the majesty
of its bass notes with the triumph and fancy of its treble. Louder,
richer, louder--and I, who stood outside in the choking fog, felt my
heart give way to its pain and my eyes to the solace of their tears.
Until the service was ended, and the organ had ceased to play I stayed
there. Once or twice I heard the voice of the cantor at his solemn
chantings--and this too brought me a distinct memory of the cantor in
our Brooklyn synagogue, and of how I had listened to him with my hands
locked in my mother's.
Outside it was all so dark, so clammy with mist--and in there they--my
own sort of people--were worshipping God--my God. And when, soon
thereafter, the doors swung open in the black of the arches and bathed
the steps below with a great, glad, golden light, I ran forward, almost
involuntarily, to gaze within.
I caught a glimpse of rich things, bright and gleaming--of carpets
glowing, walls resplendent--of golden tracery and colors. And then
people began coming through the doors down the steps, blackening and
obscuring my view of the interior.
I saw some of their faces. They were Jewish people, of course--and I
heard a man among them talking rather loudly and laughingly. He talked
with an accent.
For me the spell was broken. All the old, petty prejudice which
circumstance had nurtured in me sprang up anew. A sense of anti-climax,
of disgust came over me: yes, these--such as these were my people--and I
hated them.
And I turned and ran away, back through the park, and home.
I did not ever tell my aunt where I had been, nor anything else of the
adventure. I knew she would not have understood it. But I did. And, boy
as I was, I knew now that I needed some Faith, some link to the company
and comfort of God--and that, sooner or later, as Jew or Christian, I
must seek and find that link.
But I knew, too, that my antipathy to my own people had become
deep-seated--had grown to be part of my whole life's code.
IV
THE BOY AND THE SCHOOL
High school's terrors developed for me into a more personal terror of
that young tough, Jim Geoghen. A thorough bully, he made me feel always
that he was aware of my religion, that he could at any moment disclose
it to the rest of my classmates and make me the subject of their taunts.
No doubt, they all knew as well as he that I was a Jew--but, for the
most part, they paid little attention to that fact. A large number of
them were Jews themselves: bright-eyed, poorly-dressed little fellows
who led the class in studies, but who mingled little with any other
element.
Something stronger than myself made me take up a half-hearted
companionship with these Jewish boys. I did not want to: I dreaded being
one of them--and yet, for all my aunt's sneers and warnings, and my own
perverted pride, I always felt more comfortable with them--more as if,
in walking home with one of them after school, instead of with some
Christian boy, I was where I belonged. I know it was only
self-consciousness that gave me this feeling--but after all, comfort
must play a big part in our companionships.
Geoghen, with his towering, menacing form, his dull, animal's face, his
swinging crutch, his mysterious scapular, haunted me continuously. I
remember distinctly dreaming of him once or twice at night--and that he
stood over my bedside, in those dreams, with his crutch upraised to
strike, and his little leather scapular writhing and hissing like a
coiled snake.
One day he did strike me. It was during the noon recess when a group of
us were in the asphalted yard, eating our lunches. Mine was always an
elaborate package of dainties, wrapped in much tissue paper and doilies.
Geoghen, on the other hand, had just a chunk of rye bread, covered over
with a slice of ham. His glance, long and greedy, betrayed how envious
of me he was.
"Eat ham?" he asked with a snicker.
He did not wait for an answer, but crammed a few shreds of it towards my
mouth, his dirty fingers striking my teeth. I jumped away from him and
he followed after me, hobbling with amazing swiftness.
"Tried to bite me, eh?" he cried.
I denied it--but he did not listen and, raising his crutch, dealt me a
stinging blow with the smaller end of it--though, at that, I was let
off easy.
Towards our teacher, Mr. Levi, Geoghen and some of the other boys acted
with all the pent-up meanness and savagery of mischievous youth. Mr.
Levi's manner invited the twitting, perhaps: his pale, thin face bore
always a nettled look, his eyes seemed ever hungry with some dark
sorrow, and his mouth was always twitching. There was a fine timidity
about his way of handling us. He did not seem to be able to scold or be
authoritative.
But when he would be teaching us our Roman History, for instance, and
would tell us of the beauties of Italian scenery or of Caesar's
centurions lost in the dark, tangled German forests or of how Cleopatra
came with purple sails--or of how Cleopatra came to meet Mark Antony in
a golden barge with purple sails--then his face would light up with a
look that was glorious, and even the rattiest, coarsest of us would
thrill and be hushed with the thrill--and know, no matter how dimly,
that he was in the presence of a great and beautiful spirit.
But those times were rare; and, as a rule, we made life miserable for
Mr. Levi. He seemed to feel, I am sure, the handicap of his religion--to
know that the Irish boys of the class, and dark, sullen-faced Italians,
were thinking it an insult to be taught by a Jew--and that they were
only waiting for the opportunity for an outburst.
It came at the end of my year in high school. That last month is always
a rebellious one. The spring weather, the sense of approaching vacation
make gamins of the quietest of us.
Mr. Levi had been absent from the room for a little while. Geoghen in
that time had left his seat, hobbled up to the dais and opened the
teacher's desk. This bit of boldness drew a crowd of laughing boys to
the front of the room. They rummaged the desk, overturning and
scattering its papers, tumbling books to the floor.
Suddenly one of them stooped and picked up a book which lay sprawled
with its pages open. There was an immediate shouting, coarse and
repellent to hear.
The book of Mr. Levi's which they had found, was a Hebrew prayer book.
Geoghen took it from the other boy. He held it open and up close to his
leering face. Then slowly, with the others in his trail, he began to
march around the room, making believe to sing a heathenish jargon which
he must have thought to resemble Hebrew, twisting his face grotesquely
to seem like a Jew's, making lewd gestures--breaking off now and again
to shriek with laughter at the comicality of it all.
Then suddenly Mr. Levi returned.
He charged into the line, spun Geoghen about and tore the book from his
hands. Geoghen reached for it, as if loath to let go of so much fun--his
face impudent, grossly humorous--and Mr. Levi knocked him down.
I shall never forget how the teacher looked. His pale face, paler than
ever, gleamed as if it were cut smooth out of marble. The eyes flashed
with a noble fury. The mouth had stopped its twitching and was drawn
taut, and his teeth showed at the corners of it. And when he struck at
Geoghen his whole slender tenseness seemed to be thrown into the blow.
The crippled lad lay there for a moment, stunned. Then he got unsteadily
to his feet and picked up his crutch. A stream of profanity began to
come from his mouth. I don't think any of us had ever heard such talk
before. All the obscene things which the lowest scum of humanity can
pick up in the course of living years in the gutter, he spat out at Mr.
Levi.
But the teacher had gone back to his dais and desk and stood facing him
silently, calmly, a look of mild reproach taking the place of the anger
in his eyes. He let Geoghen have his miserable say, and then silently
pointed to the door and motioned to him to get out. And Geoghen went.
That wasn't the end of it, though. For, within a week the newspapers had
taken up the incident and enlarged it, exaggerated it--and Geoghen's
father who, it seems, was a political vassal of the alderman of this
district, had managed to have Mr. Levi brought before the Board of
Education for an investigation.
Mr. Levi had no show in that trial. He told his story truthfully. I
remember that, according to the newspapers, he made scarcely any effort
to defend himself. He merely explained that he had caught this boy
defiling the traditions of the Jewish faith, mocking what was most
sacred to him, and that he was indeed sorry that, in order to wrest the
book away from his impure hands, he had had to strike and knock down a
crippled pupil.
The newspapers called Mr. Levi a dangerous and cruel fanatic, the Board
of Education decided that he was incompetent, and Mr. Levi--his face
paler than ever, his manner more mild and saddened--announced to us on
the last day of school that he would not be with us in the next year.
I felt somehow that I would have liked to say goodby to him, but I was
afraid that he would ask me why I, in his absence on that terrible day,
had not prevented Geoghen from doing what he did--and my conscience made
a coward of me. I had a foolish idea, besides, that he did not like me.
Any man who cared so much for his religion would not be able to respect
a boy in my position. It was all very unfortunate--I was sorry for him,
to be sure--but I must not sympathize too much with him.
I told my aunt of the affair, of course, and she shuddered with
distaste.
"What a fearful lot of ruffians they must be!" she sighed. "And worst of
all, a Russian Jew for a teacher!"
I spent the summer at a Y. M. C. A. camp on the Maine coast. There were
no other Jewish boys there, but my aunt had managed to have me placed on
the roll-call somehow. I was glad enough of it. I did not want another
summer at a fashionable hotel in her and other ladies' company.
Of course, I was "Ike" to the boys of the camp. They were a good,
rough-and-ready sort who swam well, ran, tramped, sang rollicking songs
on weekdays and hymns on Sundays, grew brown and muscle-bound and manly.
Such teasing as I had from them was good-natured, and I suppose I should
have taken it in the same spirit. But I had none of their assurance, was
like a stranger in a strange land--and came out of the summer with a
still deeper shrinking from contact with other boys.
High school began again, went on and on from lagging month to month, and
soon enough was over for a second year. But this time my aunt had been
as much aroused as she could be to the baffling condition of my mind and
spirits. I had by no means lost the old loneliness. I had learned to
bear it with greater patience, but it still galled and depressed me.
Only, after that evening when I stood outside the synagogue, I had some
dim conception of what the inevitable cure would have to be.
At any rate, my aunt called in the nerve specialist a second time. He
insisted that I must be sent away. Perhaps he saw into the unsympathetic
quality of our home life.
This sent my aunt into tremors of delight. She had now a legitimate
excuse for shipping me off to a fashionable boarding school of some
sort. For days she made a feverish study of monogrammed and
photogravured catalogues from various schools in the East. It was upon a
military school on the upper Hudson that her choice finally fell. And I
am sure that this was due to the expensive appearance, the coat of arms
and Latin motto of the catalogue's cover.
What ever it was, her choice was made. She talked a good deal of
splendid uniforms, of flags unfurled to the sunset--and fired me with a
lust for the new chapter in my life.
V
THE MILITARY ACADEMY
My introduction to military school was hardly auspicious. I was now
sixteen years old--nearly seventeen. I did not look that old, however;
the commandant of the school, in examining me, took me for much less and
assigned me to a room with a boy of twelve.
At seventeen, our age is a most important item. We think so, anyhow. And
this incident dampened my spirits most disproportionately. Especially
when I discovered that this roommate was to be the only other Jew in the
school. It seemed to me a very pointed and personal insult.
He was a meek little boy, though--meeker even than I. And all through
that first night he wept aloud, smothering his tears upon his pillow and
crying for his mama--and for _kartoffel salat_. It was a Friday night, I
remember, and it must have been a Sabbath custom in his house to have
potato salad for supper. At any rate he kept me awake long into the
night.
And once, taking savage pity on him, I got up and went over to him in my
bare feet and nightgown, and told him brusquely how satisfied he ought
to be to have a mother at all; that both my father and mother were dead,
and I should never see them again, no matter how homesick I grew or how
long I waited for their coming. This silenced him on that score, but he
went on whimpering for the _kartoffel salat_.
The next day I screwed up my courage to complain to the commandant. He
was a very tall, majestic figure of a soldier who had fought through the
Spanish and Boer wars and now, in times of peace, was reduced to
teaching the manual of arms and simple drill formations to young sons of
the rich. He was the most pompous, mean and utterly selfish man I ever
met. One could see it on his handsome face.
He heard my complaint through. Then, because, being an ignorant "plebe,"
I had forgotten to salute him, he made me perform that act and retell
the whole story word for word. But he could not change my room until I
had agreed to take a cot in the general dormitory--this being reserved
for students who paid less tuition.
"You may write your aunt," he said stiffly, twirling his long mustaches,
"that we did all we could to make you comfortable. We purposely put you
in a room with young Private Ornstein because we thought it would be
more--er, more congenial."
I saw what he was driving at, and went away miserable. So they knew it
up here, too: I was a Jew, and must be separated from the others as if I
had the plague! I felt sorry for myself.
I was not particularly homesick, though I had never been able to develop
much love for my Aunt Selina. She had not given me the chance. But the
unaccustomed severing from all that was mine: my room at home, the
street that I saw from its window, the burly, Irish "cop" who stood on
the corner and passed me an occasional lofty jest--and a thousand other
things, intimate and absurdly unimportant I missed with dull emptiness.
The school was comfortable enough. It was a huge, barn-like affair,
built in the previous generation and hardly ever repainted since then,
to look at it. The towers at either end of it had tin and battered
battlements, and the flanks of steps which went up the hill on which it
stood were worn with the tread of the hundreds of boys who had marched
upon them, each succeeding year. It was so with the stairs all through
the building: each step had a shallow, smooth cup which years of
treading had ground out. It gave me a creepy sense of the place's
antiquity.
There was a large parade ground at the back of the building. Its grass
was brown and mealy, and a flag pole, sagging slightly to one side,
jutted up from the center of it like a long, lone fin.
In the quadrangle where we formed in line to march to the mess-hall,
stood a huge oak tree, century-old, with twisted limbs and browning
leaves. On one of those limbs, they told me, an American spy was hanged
by the British in Revolutionary days--but it may have been only a fable.
I have since learned that almost every military school along the Hudson
has its Revolutionary oak--but, at the time, it made a deep impression
on me, so that I could not bear to hear the creaking of the branches
against my dormitory window.
This dormitory, to which I and my belongings repaired, was a long,
narrow, whitewashed room, crowded with iron cots and intruding
wardrobes. At night, when the bugle had blown taps and the lights were
dimmed, there was a ghostly quality to the rows of white and huddled
figures that lay the length of the room. There was never absolute quiet.
Sometimes some little boy would be sobbing, sometimes two of the older
ones would be telling each other the sort of jokes that daylight
forbids--and sometimes it would be the heavy, asthmatic breathing of the
proctor who was there to keep charge.
Of the boys themselves I could not judge at first. I was too young to
judge, at that: but I was not too young that I could not realize they
were not of the same sort as I had known in the city. There I had known
the pupils of a public school, poor, rough, almost always hard workers,
eager for whatever seemed fair and quick and democratic. But these boys
were of wealthy parents, most of them. There were only a few of them who
held scholarships, and these did jobs so menial and embarrassing that,
even under the most ideal conditions, they must have suffered in the
opinions of the rest of the school. As a matter of fact, we were a
brutal little crowd of snobs, and made life miserable for these poorer
scholars who must sweep the halls and wash dishes.
I do not think all military schools are like the one I attended. I hope
not. I gained from my year there much in the way of physical
development--but that is all. For every inch of muscle that I put on I
lost something worth incalculably more: honesty and cleanliness of mind
and what little shred of self-reliance I possessed. Somehow or other, it
seemed to me that I had reached the lowest rung of boyhood here--and, as
I look back upon it, I know that I was not much mistaken.
I wrote to ask my aunt to take me away. She refused to come to see
me--but scribbled a few empty lines to accuse me of homesickness, and to
assure me I should soon be rid of it.
We did much more drilling than studying. Though nearly all of us
intended to go to college, our school day was confined to about three
hours at the most--and under teachers who were always surly, sneering
and uncouth. The standard of work in the classroom was very low. At
first I did not have any trouble at all in leading the entire school in
scholarship; but gradually, under the careless and relaxed conditions, I
grew unambitious, lazy--and found myself failing among a class of boys
who, I secretly knew, were my mental inferiors. It is so much a matter
of competition, of environment.
Of friends I made few: even of those schoolboy friends who are your
"pals" one day, your sworn enemies the next. I had one or two
sentimental encounters with a brewer's son--a great, beefy ox of a boy
who lorded it over all of us because he kept his own private horse in
the town livery stable and had his room furnished with real mission
furniture. But he had no use for me when he realized that I was a Jew,
and took particular pains to transfer me from the company of which he
was first sergeant into the band.
The band, so-called in spite of the fact that it was composed of only
fifes, drums and bugles, was a sadly amateurish thing. The little
knowledge of music that I had was just so much more than that possessed
by any other member of the organization. As a result I soon rose to the
magnificence of cadet drum-major, an office which involved a tall,
silvered stick and a shako of sweltering bear-skin. Thus, my military
training consisted mostly of learning to twirl the baton; and when
semi-annual examinations resulted in disaster for me, I was reduced to
the humility of a private without having gained more than the knack of
sending a silvered rod in rapid circles about my stiff and sorely-tried
thumb.
At that, I was glad to return to the ranks. There had been plenty of
criticism of the fact that a "plebe" should have risen so quickly to an
officership. And, of course, as Jewish boys always do, I imagined that
the demonstration was just another evidence of race prejudice.
Undoubtedly it was, to some extent--but I know that I have always been
too suspicious in that direction. Had I been braver about it, I should
have been less suspicious.
One friend I did make: a lieutenant-adjutant whose first name was Sydney
and who was in charge of the punishment marks that were allotted us for
our various misdemeanors. Many a time did Sydney, for my sake, forget
to record the two or four marks which some crabbed teacher had charged
against me for inattention or disorderly conduct.
He was a big, handsome chap, with the most attractive manners I have
ever met. He was a scholarship boy--so that he had begun his school year
with a hundred and one unpleasant tasks to perform. But somehow or other
he had managed to be rid of them all excepting this dignified one of
"keeping the books"--and I am sure it must have been a lucrative one, in
a small way, for Sydney's room was full of pictures which had been given
him from other boys' rooms, of canes and banners--even of a half dozen
pair of patent leather shoes--which may or may not have come to him in
return for his apt juggling of those hated punishment marks.
I am not attempting to judge him--and I will tell you much more of him
later on--but I must remember him as one of the most wonderful of
friends: always smiling, always ready to join in upon whatever lark was
planning--a bit of a daredevil, very much of a protector when the
bullies of the school were pressing too close for comfort.
During the year, of course, I saw or heard nothing that could remind me
of my Faith. We had to go to church on Sunday mornings. I was given my
choice, and tried accompanying one squad after another. I went to the
Episcopal, the Methodist, the Presbyterian--and it was the last that I
finally selected for good. There was a splendid old pastor there; his
white hair and trumpeting voice gave him venerableness, even when he
spoke of things that seemed to me very childish and obvious.
Once the commandant, twirling his mustaches, asked me whether I should
not like to go to the synagogue on Friday nights (there was a small one
at the edge of the town). I did not care much about the religious
inspiration to be gained from the Hebrew service, but I did think it
would be jolly fun to be allowed to go down into the town at night. And
yet I knew that some of my schoolmates would come to know why I went,
and what sort of services I attended, and--reluctantly--I declined the
opportunity.
I do not know what the bumptious commandant thought of it, but he pulled
his mustaches very, very hard.
VI
MY STEERFORTH
I wish I could write this episode in quite a different tone from all the
others. I wish I could summon all the tenderness of which boyhood
has--and which it loses--and put it into the lines of the recital that
is now due. Because, then, perhaps, you would have some knowledge and
appreciation of what the last few months of my stay at the military
school meant for me.
David Copperfield had his Steerforth. Every boy must have one.
Certainly, _I_ did. And I worshipped him with all the ardor and
unquestioning devotion that could come fresh from a boy-heart which had
never yet given itself to friendship. Steerforth was a villain; but in
David's eye he was always, unalterably, a glorious hero. This is how it
was, perhaps, with Sydney--though he was no villain, I am sure.
I spoke of him in my last chapter: told you that he was a poor student,
much in favor with the commandant for his good services. I have told
you, he was tall, fair-haired, with locks that waved back from his
white forehead (as Steerforth's did, as I remember) and merry, blue
eyes.
He befriended me because it was of his generous nature to befriend all
the lonelier boys. He used to pal with all the school "freaks," to
counsel them, to drill them privately, so that they should be more
proficient on parade. He used to make me very jealous of his large
circle of small worshippers. I thought that privilege ought to be kept
for me alone.
He used to read with me, on spring nights, in the school's dingy
library. We read "David Copperfield" together; and would glance up from
the page to watch, from the windows, the pale but glowing battle of
sunset colors over the hills and mirrored in the darkling stretch of the
Hudson. And sometimes, when the story would not give us respite, he
would smuggle the book up into the dormitory--and when all was dark
there, and the proctor slept, we would creep into the hall and read by
its dusky light until long into the night. I have read "David
Copperfield" again since then--but not with so exquisite a thrill.
And reading of Steerforth, I used to look up at Sydney and imagine that
he was that fine, attractive fellow--and that I, dumb but ecstatic in my
pride of friendship, was little David.
It seemed so wonderful to me, especially, that he was a Christian and I
a Jew, and yet there had never been any question of difference between
us. Other boys who had given me something of their friendship had made
such a brave point of telling me that they didn't mind my being a
Jew--that there were just as many good Jews as there were bad ones--and
all those other stupid and inevitable remarks that we must swallow and
forget. But with Sydney it was not like that. He had never mentioned it,
and it seemed as if he knew that I dreaded the subject--and so kept
silent on it out of kindness.
Sometimes, when the days were warm and the trees were budding, we went
off together on long walks through the country. Sydney taught me to
smoke cigarettes, and we would stop on our way at a little village store
that lay at the end of a hilly road.
An old man, who was an invalid, owned the store. But he sat all day at
his little card table in the dark, untidy rear, playing solitaire; and
it was his young daughter who would wait on us behind the counter.
She was a thin, dull-looking girl, scarcely pretty, yet with large,
sombre eyes that her lonely task explained. She was ignorant, I am sure,
and knew little of what went on in the town at the river's edge or in
the big city, fifty-odd miles away. But there was something pathetic
about her position--and when Sydney made it more and more a custom to
talk to her, to make friendly advances, I thought it only the big
generosity of his heart pouring out to succor another such shy soul as
mine.
Once or twice it was not until evening that we could steal "off bounds,"
and then we would make straight for the little store, as if we knew
that, if we did not hurry, it would be closed for the night. And we
would have only a few hurried words, but laughing, with the girl--and
she would look up at Sydney with a light in those big eyes of hers that
I had never seen before in any woman's. She left her counter, once, and
walked all the way home with us; and I saw, in the blue of the gloaming,
that her hand was tightly clasped in Sydney's, and that he whispered
things to her under his breath, as soon as I was gone a little way ahead
of them, and that they both laughed--and she looked up at him as a dumb
animal to its master. She came as far as the school gate; and after I
had gotten within, they stood for a moment together--and I thought I
could hear the sound of kissing. It was only then that I began to be
troubled.
Sydney, who was a lieutenant in the cadet battalion, had more privileges
than I. He could leave the premises when he pleased. He never had to
sign the big book in the hall when leaving and arriving back. He needed
never to give account of what he did "off bounds." It was an easy matter
for him--and there were many times, now, that he went off alone. No one
knew why he used to take that little country road that led up the hill
towards a stupid old country store. No one, that is, but me.
At first I did not think much of the girl's side of it. I was bitterly
disappointed that some one else had come between my friend and me. I was
jealous of all the time he spent with her, of the hours of reading and
walking and jesting that once were mine--and of which the lure of her
had robbed me.
But once, when we were at the store, and I stood aside from them,
watching the humped back of her old father, bent over his card table,
and saw the feeble shaking of his hand, I began to comprehend what it
might mean to him if anything should happen. Not that I knew what might
happen. I was still very young--but I felt the chill foreboding of
tragedy lurking somewhere in the background of it all. The dingy little
shop, with its flyspecked glass cases and its dusty rows of untouched
stock; the lights dimmed and blackened by clusters of whirling insects;
the old father with his bent back--and the two of them standing there
and laughing, gazing into each other's faces with the look of youth and
the Springtime.
And I went out quickly and stumbled my way home alone, leaving Sydney to
follow after.
When Sydney came in, after taps, I stole from my bed to his to speak to
him of it. But the words would not form themselves suitably, and he
laughed at my poor stammerings, and sent me off to bed again.
But one night, just before "tattoo," when the fruit trees were frothing
with light blossoms and the scent of lilacs was heavy in the air, Sydney
sent for me. He was officer-of-the-day, today, and could not leave the
premises. He wanted me to go in his place, to meet the girl and to
explain why he could not keep his appointment.
I looked at him in amazement. "Do you mean to say, you've been meeting
her every night. As late as this? Alone?"
He was playing with the tassel at the end of the red sash which the
officer-of-the-day wears about his waist. He let it drop and gave me a
quick glance.
"Yes," he said, "and mind you don't tell anybody, either. You'll have to
sneak off bounds--but I'll see you don't run much of a risk. You can
leave that part to me."
Then, when he saw me hesitate, he began to plead. "Oh, say, you won't go
back on me, will you? I've been a good friend to you and done you lots
of favors--and now when I ask you to take a little risk for me...."
I smiled. "You don't understand, Sydney," I said. "It isn't the risk."
"Then what is it?"
"It's--it's the girl."
He stepped back from me, and his face took on a coldness I had never
seen before. "Don't worry about that," he exclaimed. "That's my
business."
Then, as I hesitated, he burst out: "Hurry up, now, you little Jew!"
I stood very still for a minute. Then I felt my face flush hot and I
flung away from him.
It had come at last. He, my best friend--my only friend--he had called
me a Jew!
I wanted to scream back at him, to beat him with my fist, to denounce
him and curse him. I felt betrayed, degraded as I had never been before.
Then I gulped hard and controlled myself.
I said nothing. I merely saluted and set off upon his errand.
But I did not find the girl at the street corner he had mentioned. I
went on, only a few hundred yards, to the store. There was a dim blue
light in one of its windows, and I crept up and pressed my face against
the glass, knowing that she was probably sitting up and waiting.
Yes, she was there--behind the counter with her shawl still over her
head and her eyes fixed on the cheap wall clock. She could not see me in
the darkness outside--not even when she turned her head and gave me a
full view of her face, so that I could see how strangely pale and set it
was, and how deeply lurking in her eyes was the fear of the moment.
I did not go in and tell her anything. I could not. The sight of her and
the appeal of her thin, tragic little body sent me hurrying back with my
errand uncompleted--and glad, madly glad that it was so.
I crept up to bed as soon as I was "in bounds" again. I wanted to avoid
Sydney. Nor would I give him a chance to speak to me the next morning. I
felt that I knew now, almost in its entirety, the scheme he was
laying--and the climax which was fast approaching. And, after having
seen her, as I did last night, I knew that I could never go walking with
him again or have more to do with him, and that I must go back to her,
some day soon, traitor-wise, and warn her against him who had been my
best friend.
In the afternoon, after school was done, a crowd of us obtained
permission to go swimming in a nearby lake. Sydney was among us: the
leader of us, in fact. He tried to speak to me--perhaps he was going to
apologize to me for having called me a Jew--I do not know. But, though I
did not give him the chance, I remember well how tall and brave he
looked, and how his hair waved back from his forehead like Steerforth's.
And like Steerforth, too, he was drowned.
Schoolboys are careless of their swimming. We did not notice until it
was long too late that Sydney had disappeared. When his body was
recovered, the doctors worked over it for fully two hours. But it was no
use.
* * * * *
His funeral was held in the school parlor the next morning. But it had
been a night of terrors, of whispering groups, of Death's shadow over us
all--and we were but children. His empty bed, his dress uniform tossed
carelessly over the back of a chair, the knowledge of his insensible
presence in the undertaker's shop at the other end of town ... brought
fear and wakefulness to us all.
And as for me, I sat all night at the dormitory window and listening to
the creak and groan of the old Revolutionary oak in the quadrangle,
thought of many things: of the walks we had taken, of the hundred
smiling adventures we had shared, of all the glad things he had taught
me--and then, of the girl--and of the tragic face of her--as I had seen
it last.
And I wished that he had lived only a few minutes longer so that I might
have pleaded with him and shown him where he was wrong. And, perhaps, in
those few minutes he would have reached out his hand to me, and begged
forgiveness for having called me what he did--perhaps he might have done
so--and oh, I wanted with all my heart to forgive him and tell him it
did not matter--and to wish him God-speed.
But in a few days, when I summoned enough courage to go up the hilly
road in search of the little old store, I found it closed. The cracked
shades were down before the windows, and a "For Sale" sign was on the
door. The father and daughter had moved away, I heard in the town; but
no one knew where--or why.
But when I was back in the dormitory, I took the book of "David
Copperfield" from under my pillow, and put it back in the library, and
did not attempt to read further in it, then.
VII
FRESHMAN YEAR
New adventures must be prefaced by new hopes. My entering college meant
the starting of a thousand new dreams, ambitions--and seemed to me an
opening gate to a land stronger than any I had yet heard of: a land of
real men, virile, courteous and kind, whose thoughts were never petty,
whose breadth of mind unfailing.
It was only a few weeks after Sydney's death that I took my college
entrance examinations. I had taken the "preliminaries" the year before,
and I entered upon these "finals" low in spirit, disinterested, very
much aware of how poor a training for them this last year at military
school had given me.
Nevertheless, I managed to pass them. Not brilliantly, to be sure, but
by a small margin which left no doubt but that I should be accepted in
the freshman class of the city's university.
I have not called my alma mater by any other name than this: I do not
wish, out of a sense of loyalty, to define it more closely. You will
say, before I am through, that I am perverse in that loyalty; perhaps
so--but I do not wish to transgress upon it. Suffice it then, that my
college days were spent at one of the two universities which New York
has within its borders.
I shall never forget how my heart bounded when I received, through the
mail, that little leather covered book which college men know as the
"Freshman Bible." It is the directory of undergraduate activities issued
by the university Y. M. C. A., and is sent to all members of the
incoming class. I read each little page and its small, fine print as if
my life depended upon its reading. When I came to understand that
freshman must wear a black, green-buttoned cap upon the campus, a deep
awe of collegiate law and order came over me. When I saw the little
half-tone prints of the chapel, the gymnasium, the baseball field, I
felt that I was glimpsing, before my proper time, the sacred precincts
of a land which would be magical, splendid with an eternal sunlight,
peopled only with a chivalrous and knightly manhood. I suppose that
college was to me, as to most subfreshman, a place of green swards and
track meets and those musical harmonies which glee clubs can so
throatily accomplish.
I was at the hotel in New Hampshire when this book arrived. The very
same mail brought me the definite results of my college entrance
examinations. I remember that I was just starting to walk down to the
lake with my aunt when they arrived. I knew what was in the big ominous
envelope--and I was afraid to open it. I crammed it into my coat pocket,
careful not to let my Aunt Selina see it, and went on to the boat house,
hired a boat and rowed her dutifully around the lake for a full two
hours. She remarked upon my silence--but I did not tell her that my fate
was in my pocket--and that I dared not look upon it.
But when I was back at the hotel, I went straightway to my room and
opened the envelope, stripped out the blue, bank-note sheet and
read--yes, I had passed every examination. And I was a regularly
enrolled student at the university.
I told my aunt of it at lunch, as if it were a casual thing--and she
treated it as such, too. If I had had any doubts of her lack of genuine
interest in me, I knew it now for certain. It was just a matter of
course to her--this entrance into college--and to me, in turn, it meant
so much: a new work, a new land, a life entirely new and shot through
with hopes. I did not tell her that, but let her change the topic
quickly. She was intent upon talking fashions with Mrs. Fleming-Cohen.
I had hated to come to this hotel for another year. The people persisted
in making things graciously unpleasant for us. I was beginning to be
old enough to feel it keenly--and not old enough to overlook. I wonder,
for that matter, if Jews are ever old enough to overlook it?
But Aunt Selina was dictatress of my destinies. She had declared I must
either come along to the hotel or else I would not be allowed to enter
college. In the face of such an alternative I had yielded quickly. But
there had already begun between my aunt and me a chasm that grew daily
wider, deeper, more hopelessly incapable of bridging. When one has been
away for a year, one returns to find grim truths. I had met other
people, seen other lives and other souls since I had been in boarding
school: I was not clouded now by my blood relationship to Mrs. Haberman
or by day after day of close but unintimate companionship. I saw her as
she was: a shallow, flighty woman whose thoughts were always upon that
sort of society which spells itself with a capital S, whose petulance
found no ease--always restless, always ambitious for petty things,
wanting only what she could not have--an idle woman, foolish in her
idleness.
In spite of her taking it as a matter of course, she spent the whole
day, after she had learned my news, in spreading it about the porch and
parlors of the hotel. She seemed to imagine that it would interest
every one--even Mrs. Van Brunt, the arbiter of elegance of the mountain
clique, who, on hearing it, sniffed, patted her lorgnette with a lace
handkerchief, and inquired if a great many Jews did not attend this
particular university.
"Really, I should not think of sending any relative of mine there," she
sniffed. "Not that I have a prejudice against Jews, of course--in fact,
I consider myself very democratic. I have many Jewish acquaintances.
Many of my best friends are Jews."
My aunt, who had undoubtedly had to listen to these catchwords as often
as any other Jew or Jewess must, attempted not to understand why Mrs.
Van Brunt had spoken them. A few minutes later she made a few unblinking
and pointed remarks about having to attend a convention of Christian
Science workers in the fall--as if to protest that Mrs. Van Brunt had
made a grievous and embarrassing error.
I asked my aunt, a few days later, if I was not to be allowed to live in
one of the university dormitories. Whether or not his college is in his
home town, every boy wants the full flavor of undergraduate life--wants
to live on the campus, to throw himself heart and soul into the college
games and customs. I could not see how college would mean anything to me
if I were to go on living at home in that dull, comfortless apartment
of Aunt Selina's.
Youth is always eager for emancipation--always a little too thoughtless
in its eagerness.
Perhaps I was wrong in forgetting what I owed Aunt Selina. She took
great offense at my wish. She spoke, her voice choked with tears, of the
many years that she had cared for me, fostered me, guarded me from a
world of foreign things--"ruffians and kikes and niggers," was the way
she described it.
At any rate, I remember that I spent a whole day in thinking it out for
myself upon a lonely walk, and that, at the end of it, I came to tell
her that she was right and that I was ashamed of wanting to leave
her--that I would live home with her, and try to gain the best of
college in that way. Privately, I knew that I could never gain as
much--but I had made up my mind not to pain her, confident that it would
be worth the sacrifice.
The days lagged slowly to the end of that summer. I was preparing in a
hundred little ways for the great adventure: sending for all sorts of
stereotyped books on the moral conduct of college men, on the art of
making friends, on the history and traditions of my university. I was
prepared to be its most loyal son. I could hardly wait for the stupid
weeks at this mountain hotel to pass by, for the opening day to arrive.
And then, when the trees were beginning to fleck with scarlet and the
summer heather streaked with goldenrod, we did depart for the city. It
was only a week before college would begin.
Then five days, four days, three, two, one. And on the night before
registration day, which would commence the college year, I sat for a
long while at my table-desk, dreaming high things--hope and fear
mingling with my dreams, charging them with an exquisite uncertainty,
making them pulse with the things that were innermost in me.
I was old enough, I thought, to review all the past--to see myself with
youth's over-harsh criticism of itself--to realize that, so far, I had
made a miserable, cringing, cowardly botch of my conduct and
convictions. Some day, soon, I seemed to feel, there would come a moment
of crisis--a moment when all the shy, stammering manhood that I knew to
be in my heart would fling itself suddenly into the open and make me
strong and confident, helpful to myself and many others. I had always
longed to be a leader--as every boy does--and so far I had been a
slave--slave, most abjectly of all, to my own fears and prejudices. But
it would be different at college: there would be something--I did not
know what--which would fling courage into me, fill my veins with
flame--and it troubled me to wonder what that thing would be. Had any
one told me, then, that it would be Judaism, I should have either
laughed or been insulted.
For I was just as much afraid as ever of what hardships my religion
might work for me at college. I had as much fear, as much abhorrence of
the truth, in that regard. I wanted so much to forget it--to be one of
the other sort, little caring for creed in any form, but wishing I were
safe in the comfort of having been born into the faith of the majority.
As I looked at it then, I was going into these new four years with a
tremendous handicap scored against me. It seemed so unfair: I cared so
little for Jewish things, yet I would have to be identified with them
throughout my entire course. I had learned, by now, that I could not
escape them.
I went into college with a deeper sense of the injustice of it all than
I had ever had. I was going with the feeling that, come what may, I
should have to bow before the inevitable stigma of my race--And yet, I
hoped so yearningly that it would be otherwise. I hoped--and
dreamed--and laughed at my dreams, and told myself that college men were
only boys, after all: boys as bigoted, as cruel in their prejudices as
any that I had met at high school or military academy.
And perhaps I was justified in this last opinion. For, when I appeared
on the campus the next morning, headed for the dean's office to file my
registration, I was met by a ratty, little sophomore who made me buy a
second-hand freshman cap from him at four times its original value.
And when he had my money in his pocket, and was a safe distance across
the green from me, he began to laugh and shout:
"Oi, oi! oi, oi!"
So that this was my introduction into college life.
VIII
WITHIN THE GATES
This initial experience did not frighten me. I came up to the first day
of college in the firm and joyous belief that here, if anywhere, that
old bugbear of my past school days would be absent. I came into sight of
buildings that were new to me, and oh, how stately to my freshman eyes!
I came across a campus that was golden with the autumn grass, where red
leaves filtered down from old elms, and where, from heights, I caught
glimpses of the university's private parks, still green and soft, and of
the river beyond--and of the clean flanks of white stone buildings and
marble colonnades, half hidden in the trees. It was all so beautiful. It
was the promised land and I was within its gates.
The giddy knowledge of it buoyed me up and sent me across the campus
humming to myself one of the alma mater songs which I had so religiously
learned from that "Freshman Bible." I was on my way to my first class.
Directly ahead of me was the broad, lofty door of the recitation
building and, a little to the left, a fountain's water spilled itself
singingly over into a shallow marble basin.
Suddenly a trio of sophomores bounded out from behind a clump of bushes.
They came about me in a whooping circle, took me by the head and feet
and tossed me into the fountain.
I clambered out, dripping, spluttering, but--be it said to my
credit--still smiling. I had heard that this was the customary hazing
which all freshmen must endure--and I knew enough to take it with as
good a grace as they gave it.
I started on my way to the recitation hall again, my clothes leaving a
trickling line behind me on the walk. But they pulled me back and
thumped me into the water again. It happened a third time before they
let me go. And then one of them--a big, stocky fellow who wore a thick,
rolling sweater on which the college letter was emblazoned--laughed
heartily and thwacked me on the back and roared that I was a good kid,
even for a Jew!
The kindness of his remark was perhaps deeply meant. I've no doubt, he
thought to be paying me a compliment--but I went away, wetter than ever,
fast contracting a cold--and with a lump in my throat for which the cold
was not at all responsible.
In the class room I found a number of my new classmates in quite as
damp a condition as I. I was glad to be among them, to know that I had
not been singled out--and, being miserable, enjoyed their company. The
instructor seemed to be making a point of paying no attention to our
wetness. It made me wonder how the faculty felt about hazing. Evidently
they shut their eyes to it.
The class was soon over, since we were only kept for a preliminary
explanation of the course and a few words of supercilious greeting on
behalf of the young instructor. We came out upon the campus again,
locked arm in wet arm, paradoxically proud of what we had suffered.
But some more sophomores were waiting for us. We had to go into the
fountain over and over again. My own personal score was nine times. Nor
did my good nature--kept at what a cost!--serve to bring me any
leniency.
In fact it was only when I showed a trace of anger that the sophomores
finally released me and took me over to the gymnasium to give me a
sweater and a pair of old pants, much too big for me, to wear until my
other suit was dry.
I went home from that first day jubilant, excited, sure of my coming
four years. I had proven to myself and to all these others that I was
ready to take a joke, to share it and enjoy it even when it was "on me."
I had come out of it all with a tame but conclusive triumph of patience
and good nature.
I told my aunt of what had happened, when we sat down to dinner. She was
shocked at the recital. She wanted to know what sort of boys these
sophomores were--were they of good family and all that? Otherwise, if
they were ruffians, common street boys--she was going to write a letter
of complaint to the Dean of the university. I had a hard time
restraining her from it: I only did succeed by maintaining stoutly that
hazing was part of the social scheme, and was indulged in only by "boys
of the best families!"
The next morning, when I had traveled uptown to the college site, I was
met by more than one sophomore and upper classman who gave me a broad
smile or a humorous wink. The story of my dousings had probably gone the
rounds of the campus.
That night there was to be a reception given to the freshman class by
the college Y. M. C. A. I had arranged with Aunt Selina that I would not
be home until late.
There was a baseball game between the two classes in the afternoon. The
sophomores won, of course--as I believe they almost always do in that
first game. But after that there was a class rush around the flag pole.
I was light enough to climb up, stockinged-feet, upon the shoulders of
some of the taller classmates. I managed, somehow or other, to reach
that silly little flag and to tear it down, and then to dive down into
the twisting, jammed crowd below me, hugging the rag to my breast in
bulwarked hiding. And when the whistle blew I was still in possession of
it.
Popularity is a heady wine--and I had my fill of it that day and
evening. I--little I--had won the class rush for the freshmen. Everybody
seemed to know my name, to recognize me, to want to speak to me. At the
reception, later on, I was surrounded by a great group of freshmen too
shy to stand by themselves. Under ordinary circumstances, of course, I
should have been more shy than any of them--but these were not ordinary
circumstances. I was a suddenly awakened hero, a wolf who had thrown off
his meek lamb's outfit.
As I was leaving for home, full of ice cream, punch and much
self-conceit, a junior came toward me hesitatingly. He seemed to be
near-sighted, for he groped rather pitifully for my sleeve, and thrust
his face close to mine.
"Aren't you the freshman that won the rush?" he asked me.
I told him promptly that I was.
"Well, won't you come around for lunch tomorrow at our fraternity
house? We'll be mighty glad to have you."
I had learned a little of fraternities at school. They had not amounted
to anything there; but I knew that college fraternities were
different--were big, powerful organizations which could make or break a
man's college career. My aunt had spoken to me of fraternities, too; she
wanted me to join one which should give me--and her--a deal of social
prestige. And I, hungering for new experiences and--as every boy
does--for things that are mysterious and secretive, wanted, too, the
distinction and glory of making a fraternity. It seemed to my freshman
mind the most important thing upon the horizon.
And so, when this upper classman invited me to luncheon, my heart
bounded high with expectation. I knew from other college men that an
invitation to lunch was but the beginning of the usual system of
"rushing" a prospective member: the preliminary skirmish of festivities
which would prelude the final invitation to join the fraternity. And I
was going to lunch at one of the most influential and exclusive of the
university's fraternities.
It is needless to say, I was dressed in my Sunday-best the next morning.
And, after my 11 o'clock recitation, I hurried out to find the upper
classman waiting for me by the side of the fountain which had been the
scene of my yesterday's wetting. I smiled indulgently at the thought of
it. How changed everything was since then! The upper classman waited for
me to come up to him. I saw that he did not recognize me at once, and a
tremor of suspicion came over me. What if it were all a hoax--another
bit of hazing?
He was immensely cordial; took me by the arm and marched me across the
campus, down a side street and into the palatial, pillared house of his
fraternity. On the way, his genial face full of a stupid, expansive
smile, and his near-sighted eyes twinkling vacantly, he told me of the
men I should meet.
Inside, in the magnificent hall, with its weathered oak beams and
mission furniture and bronze plaques upon the tapestried walls, I met a
host of good-looking, well-dressed men. There was evidently a "rushing
committee" of upper classmen, who took me about and introduced me to all
the others. There were one or two freshmen, too, whom I recognized; and
these were wearing in their lapels a strange, gleaming little button. I
was to learn later than this was the "pledge button" which announced
that these men had been offered membership to the fraternity and had
accepted it.
When we went into luncheon the near-sighted junior sat me next to him.
He seemed tremendously embarrassed. Once or twice he leaned over to
whisper to other men; then he would steal a glance at me and blush a
brick red, his inefficient eyes puckering to squint closely.
The other men, for the most part, disregarded me. A classmate--one of
the pledged freshmen--spoke to me now and then, but loftily and as if it
were an effort of hospitality.
As I felt the coldness increase, I grew glum and silent. My new-found
confidence oozed out into bewilderment. What had I done? What had I said
to insult them all, to hurt my chances of election to their midst? I
could not figure it out.
They were courteous enough. They were what they claimed to be: a crowd
of young gentlemen. But I could sense, electric in the air, the
disapproval and amusement which they felt.
And after lunch was over, I did not join the others in the big,
leather-walled smoking room. I made a mumbled apology and went. They
accepted it blandly, smiling, smirking a little, and let me go.
I had just gone down the steps and towards the campus when the
near-sighted junior came after me, redder than ever of face, his eyes,
blinking very hard. He hurried up behind me and put his hand on my
shoulder.
"See here, 'fresh,'" he said thickly, "I owe you an explanation. I don't
want the other fellows to see me giving it to you. Come on, walk along
with me."
At the corner, out of range of the windows of his fraternity house, he
began his hurried, jumbling speech.
"I could see," he said, "how uncomfortable they made you. They tried to
be decent, honestly they did. But they--they've never had--never had to
entertain a--one of your sort before, don't you see? We--we don't ever
take--well, it's all my fault. I'm so darn near-sighted that I didn't
realize. I couldn't see--I didn't know--"
He could not go on, for his dull, honest face was fearfully distressed.
"What didn't you know?" I demanded.
"That you were--now, don't get sore, because I like Jews as much as any
folks--and I can't see why we don't take them in our fraternity. Only--"
"Only you didn't realize I was a Jew," I said hotly.
"That's it--I'm so near-sighted that I--"
I did not wait for his stammered finish. I went swiftly away and home,
my heart well-nigh bursting.
IX
MY AUNT AND I
"It isn't true," snapped my aunt, when I told her of what had happened
at the fraternity house. "I can't imagine that young gentlemen of such
an aristocratic set could act so meanly. You must have done something
wrong. You must have insulted them personally, yourself. I'll wager,
you're to blame--not they."
I was too sickened by it all to protest. I repeated to her slowly the
words of apology which the near-sighted junior had spoken to me at our
parting, and, when they did not convince her, gave up the task and went
to bed without any supper. I was old enough to have cured myself of the
habit of tears--though, as a matter of fact, no men ever do quite want
to cure themselves of it--but I remember that my pillow was damp the
next morning, and the grey, foggy sky, through the window, seemed in sad
tune with my spirits.
I dressed and went up to college, fearful to meet any of that fraternity
crowd again, wondering how they would act towards me, trying to be
indignant, but succeeding only in a shriveled self-debasement. Because I
was a Jew--that was their one and only reason for showing me the door in
so polite and gentlemanly a fashion.
But when, at the chapel entrance, I bumped into one of the pledged
freshmen, he simply did not pay any attention to me at all. He appeared
not to know me, murmured an unhurried and general, "Excuse me," and went
on. A few yards further on, I met with one of the seniors at whose
fraternity table I had been sitting the noon before. He bowed hastily
and walked past.
Neither one nor the other of them seemed to be much perturbed by the
meeting, nor to notice my own discomfiture. I could not imagine that
such incidents as mine of yesterday were common occurrences and yet they
seemed to take it so much as a matter of course.
I fought with my pride in the matter for a long while. Then, at the end
of a noon-time recitation, I spoke of it to a freshman with whom I had
struck up a friendship two days old. The friendship ended there. He
seemed scandalized at my mentioning fraternities at all: it was a
subject far too sacred for discussion, evidently. He merely snapped back
stiffly that he expected to be pledged to another fraternity sometime
during the day, and that he did not care to hurt his chances by talking
too freely. It made me see the secretiveness of the system from another
angle.
I received no more invitations to lunch. I contented myself henceforth
with a humble sandwich and glass of milk at the "Commons" eating hall.
It was galling to see classmates being escorted across the campus to the
fraternity houses, to overhear them accepting invitations to theater in
the evening, to watch the process of their conversion to this fraternity
or that one. It was like being in a bustling crowd with hands tied and
mouth gagged--and the sullen rage of a disappointed boyhood in my heart.
Aunt Selina did not know how to comfort me. I think she tried to, in her
superfluous way. At first she wanted to make light of the fraternities,
gibing at them whenever opportunity arose at the dinner table. But she
did not feel lightly about it--and her disappointment was too great to
be laughed away. She still had a dim suspicion that I had made some
fearful misstep--had brought the failure on myself. And so, after a
while, she kept silent on the subject, and would not speak of it at all.
But her silence was more harshly eloquent than all her foolish talk had
been.
It seems that Paul Fleming, a nephew of Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, had
belonged to a fraternity at college; and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen was always
alluding to it, as if it gave her a social security which my own aunt
could never attain. Aunt Selina wanted me to make a fraternity to prove
to Mrs. Fleming-Cohen how easy a matter it was. She had implied as much,
when we had first come back from the country.
Our life together as days went by, seemed to be going peacefully and
smoothly into some sort of a makeshift groove. I knew well enough that
she and I would never grow to be genuinely fond of each other. Our aims
were different; and the beginning of college had given me some inkling
of what my aims were going to be. I was only eighteen, to be sure; but I
was older, more settled than most youths of twenty or more. I blamed
myself a little for my impatience with her, for my hasty conclusions
concerning those friends of hers who came up from Washington square to
eat her meals and to fill her with senseless chatter of art and
literature. And yet I could not help loathing them. Whenever they came
to dinner, I made an excuse of studying at the house of another freshman
for the evening, and thus escaped them.
The first month of college was not yet over when I went, on one of those
evenings, to hear an extra-curriculum lecture on the social duties of a
college man. I had expected to hear a fop of some sort deliver dicta on
the proper angle of holding a fork or inside information as to the most
aristocratic set in college. It was that word _social_ that misled me.
Instead, the speaker was a rough, business-like man, rather shabbily
dressed, who heaped fiery anathema upon the idle rich. And he spoke of
the true social duties. He spoke mainly--because he knew most about
it--concerning the opportunities for college men in settlement work.
I had never heard of settlement work before. It was a new thing to
me--and perhaps it was its newness that at first attracted me so
strongly. I waited until the end of the lecture, and joined a little
group of listeners who gathered around the man with eager questions. I
had a few of my own to ask, too--and he answered mine as he answered all
of them, simply, kindly, directly.
The speaker was Lawrence Richards, director of one of the largest
settlement societies in New York. There was something powerful,
magnetically enthusiastic about him--and his face was tremendously keen
and happy.
He was gathering up his papers to depart when he chanced to remark to
me:
"See here, will you come over to my fraternity house with me and talk
things over? We can sit in the library, and I'll tell you lots more
that I know will interest you. We'll be comfortable--and fairly alone."
Mr. Richards, it seems, had gone to my university ten years ago. I asked
him the name of the fraternity. When he told me it, I shook my head, No.
It was the house at which I had had that memorable luncheon--and whither
I was not to be invited any more.
"Why not?" he persisted. "I want you down in my settlement. I want to
show you how you can be of help to us. Won't you come over to the
fraternity house?" And when I again declined, he insisted on knowing
why.
But I did not tell him. "Perhaps some of the members of your active
chapter will tell you," I replied, "but I will not."
He looked at me sharply, and his face grew grim. "I see," he said
warmly. "The nasty little cads. Well, it's harder for me to excuse them
than it is for you--and I'm their sworn brother!"
So I made an appointment to come down to the settlement, instead, and to
take supper with him there some evening. He wanted to show me the
splendid organization of things there: the club rooms, the dance hall,
the gymnasium and reading room. He wanted to introduce me to the
resident leaders. He wanted to persuade me to become a leader, myself:
to attend one of the clubs of young boys, to join with them in their
meetings, their debates, their entertainments and studies, to help them
by friendliness and example.
"I suppose," he said, when he left me at a subway kiosk, "that you feel
mighty sorry that you didn't make a fraternity, don't you? Well, I'm
offering you a membership in a bigger and better one than ever had a
chapter in a college--the brotherhood of humanity. You'll be proud of
it, little fellow, if you'll join. So come along down and let us 'rush'
you!"
It was so good-natured a joke that I could not resent it. I had had my
eyes opened, tonight, by some of the things that Mr. Richards had told
me. I had learned that the city has its poor, its sick and wicked, its
boys and girls embroiled in wrong environments, its lonely and
unambitious, who must be comraded and wakened. And I had learned that I,
young as I was, was able to help, to foster, to do good for such as
these.
On the way home, I passed a street corner where boys a few years younger
than myself were loitering in obscene play. A little further on I came
to a girl, not more than fifteen or sixteen, who was being followed by
some toughs. She was a Jewish girl, too, I noticed--and she was crying
with fright. I put her on a street car to get her out of harm's way.
It was of just such as these, both boys and girls, that Mr. Richards had
spoken this evening. Perhaps he was right--and what a noble thing to be
able to join in the help and companionship which the settlement could
give them. I resolved to go down to him the very next evening.
When I reached home, Aunt Selina was just getting ready for bed. She
came out into the hall in a pink silk dressing-gown, all frills and
ruffles, and asked me complainingly where I had been so long. She was
angry at my abrupt departure when her evening's guests arrived.
"I have been to hear a lecture delivered by a Mr. Lawrence Richards," I
told her.
"Oh! That settlement man?" she asked.
"Yes."
She almost snorted. "I met him once at a meeting of our Ladies'
Auxiliary. He is such a plain, undistinguished fellow!"
I hesitated a moment. "Aunt Selina," I said, "I am going down tomorrow
night to have supper with him. He wants me to become a leader in one of
the settlement clubs. It would take only one night a week, he says----"
My aunt was so affected by the announcement that I had to run and fetch
her smelling salts. "Oh, oh, down into that awful tenement house
district? Down among those dreadful people? Indeed, you shan't go. If
you do, I shall never allow you to come back! Think of the diseases you
might spread!"
And she carried on so hysterically that, after a while, I gave in and
promised I would not go--not for a while, anyhow.
"Why aren't you like other boys of your class?" she demanded. "Why
aren't you content to make the best of things and be satisfied with the
splendid opportunities you have?"
"That's just what I'm trying to do, Aunt Selina," I told her. "Trying to
make the best--the really best of everything that comes into my life!"
But she was unimpressed, and went off sobbing to bed.
X
THE RULES OF THE GAME
I became rather friendly with that near-sighted junior. He was so
genial, good-hearted, apologetic a chap that I could not harbor any
resentment against him for the events which took place at his fraternity
house. They were not his fault, anyhow.
His name was Trevelyan, and he came from one of the oldest families in
New York; one of the wealthiest, too. At college he was considered
somewhat of a fool, his never-failing good nature giving justification
for the opinion. I don't think that, since that first embarrassing
luncheon, I have never seen him unhappy--and even then it was on my
account he was discontented, not on his own. And outside of college he
must have been respected with all the awe which New Yorkers accord to
the Sons of the American Revolution and five or six million dollars. But
he was the least lofty, least snobbish man that I have ever known. Most
of his college friends thought he was too much of a fool to play the
snob; I thought he was too much of a gentleman.
He came to dinner at my aunt's apartment after he had known me for about
a month. I do not know who of us was the more proud, my aunt or I--for
to me the idea of having a junior and a member of one of the most
powerful fraternities visiting at my home was quite as much of a marvel
as my aunt seemed to feel it, that a member of the Trevelyan family--the
Trevelyan's of Fifth avenue and Sixty-fourth street, don't you
know--should be seated at her table and giving gracious attention to her
gossipy conversation. For a whole week after his visit Aunt Selina made
a great point of it--and of telling her friends of it. The distinction
of having a Trevelyan to dinner was a great triumph over Mrs.
Fleming-Cohen, who had once entertained a Jewish mining magnate from the
Far West--but who had never attained anything like a Trevelyan.
I think Trevelyan began at first feeling very much ashamed and sorry; he
was just trying to square up matters with his own conscience. He had a
room in one of the college dormitories. He seldom used it, but when he
did he would invite me to stay up there with him and to sit until the
wee, quiet hours, talking over our briar pipes, interspacing the layers
of blue smoke with argument and stirring plans. Trevelyan had great
hopes for me. He had discovered that I was a runner.
As a matter of fact, I had done a little practicing with the track team
at military school. I had never amounted to much, had never stood out
tremendously in meets. I liked to run, I liked the healthy trim that the
exercise gave me, but I'm afraid I never took it very seriously.
But Trevelyan saw things differently. Here was my great chance. Never
mind the college papers, the literary societies and all that tame
coterie of lesser institutions. If I made the track team I would be a
college hero--and, after seeing me capture the flag in the class rush,
he had no doubt of my vim and nerve. I must make the track team.
(Trevelyan, by the way, was assistant manager of the track
organization.)
So, soon enough, I was out on the windy field in my old school
track-clothes, racing around and around with a sturdy intention of
proving myself worthy of Trevelyan's friendship. That was my chief
reason for "coming out for track," after all.
The coach, a taciturn, gray old fellow, whose muscles were running too
fat and whose temper had frayed out in the years of snarling at
prospective champions, paid little attention to me until the week before
the freshman-sophomore track meet. Then he tried me out at a 44-yard
run. That was what I had been used to doing at school. There was only
one man in the freshman class who could beat me in this run for certain.
There was no reason, said Trevelyan, why I should not be absolutely sure
of my place on the class team.
Three days before the meet the other "44" man sprained his knee. He was
out of the race for the time being. There was no doubt now that I would
be put in. So said Trevelyan, and so, in surly, semi-official fashion,
said the coach.
But we had not counted on the captain of the freshman track team. This
was one of my classmates, chosen from among the many candidates by the
captain of the 'varsity team. This freshman leader I did not know
personally. I had met him almost every day on the field, but he had
never recognized me. His track shirt bore the monogram of a noted
preparatory school; and it was echoed that he was the handsomest man in
the class. He was most certainly the most snobbish. He was thrown into
contact with me in various organizations during our four years. I do not
remember his ever having bowed to me. In his college world I, and such
as I, did not exist.
At any rate, the college newspaper came out one noon to announce the
members of the freshman track team, as chosen by its captain. My name
was not among them.
In vain did Trevelyan protest to the 'varsity captain, to the coach--I
even think he took the matter as high as a meeting of the faculty
athletic advisory committee. Nothing could be done. The 'varsity captain
shrugged his shoulders, the old coach growled but said nothing, the
faculty advisers kept away from the topic as if it were beneath their
tutelary notice. And the freshman-sophomore track meet was held with me
on the side-lines, among the spectators. I have no reason to gloat over
it, but it is a rather amusing point that we lost the entire meet
through losing the four-forty yard run.
"It's a dirty shame," said Trevelyan, his squinting eyes full of rue and
anger. "I knew that sort of thing went on in the 'varsity circle--but I
didn't think they'd carry it down into the class teams. It's all college
politics--and college politics are the meanest, most vindictive intrigue
on earth."
I didn't ask him for a further explanation, and I suppose he felt it
would be kinder not to make one. But I knew well enough to what he
referred--and why there had been this sudden, underhanded
discrimination. I made up my mind to forget the whole episode. I had not
been so tremendously anxious to make the track team that I would let the
disappointment of it rankle and grow and ruin my year's fun. I put it
all behind me, resolving to take my enthusiasm into some other of the
college activities where it would be more sincerely appreciated.
I consulted Trevelyan about it. He suggested the college newspaper. But
after he had made the suggestion, he began to stammer and make strange
protests. I asked him to tell me plainly what was wrong.
"Why, it's the same with that as with the track team. The
editor-in-chief of the paper is in my 'crowd.' I'll speak to him--and
save you any trouble. If he says yes, then you go out and win a place on
the board of editors. But if he says no, I want you to promise me that
you won't subject yourself to any more of this puppy-dog prejudice."
I did promise. And two days later I received a postcard from Trevelyan,
telling me that it would hardly be worth my while to try for the college
paper. He added, in the large, unruly handwriting which his
near-sightedness made necessary:
"You may go on breathing, however, if you don't make a noise at it."
He supplemented this, a few nights later, when he and I were at our old
places in his room. He threw down his pipe in the midst of talking about
something carefully unimportant, and sat up with a laughably angry
face.
"See here, 'fresh,'" he bawled out, "you're getting the rottenest deal I
ever saw. You know why--so do I. And we're going to show them a thing or
two. We're going to buck up against the strongest thing in the
world--and that thing is prejudice. We're going to beat it, too. Do you
understand? Were going to beat it out! Smash it to pieces!"
Yes, I understood, I said. I understood it all only too well. So well,
indeed, that I knew there was no use trying to fight. I knew that
prejudice of race and religion was the strongest shield of the ignorant
and mean, that neither he nor I could fight it fairly--and that, if he
came into the fight by my side, he would ruin his own chances of being
one of the biggest men in the college world when his senior year
arrived.
"A lot I care for being a big man in a place of little thoughts," he
snapped back at me. "I'm ready to take the consequences, now and forever
after."
"Have you thought of what your fraternity brothers might say about it?"
I asked him.
"I don't care--I don't--well, if they--." His voice died away in
perplexity. I had hit upon his weak spot. He was an easy-going, likeable
chap; he hated a rumpus. If he made any sort of fight against the
anti-Jewish prejudice, he would have his whole fraternity against him,
he would perhaps be shunned by all his sworn brothers, by his best
college friends. His enthusiasm became a little dulled, then died down
into a great good-natured sigh.
"I suppose you're right, 'fresh,'" he admitted slowly. "I'm not of the
fighting sort. And I have my fraternity to consider. That's the worst of
belonging to a fraternity." He took up his pipe again and smoked in
silence for a while. "I suppose you think you'll never be happy, now
that you know you aren't going to be in a fraternity. Take my word for
it, you're ten times luckier in having your freedom. Wait until you're
an upperclassman and you'll agree with me."
It seemed a dreadful sacrilege for him to be saying it. Besides, I
thought he was blaming his own lack of fighting power on his fraternity
in too heavy and unjust a degree. I wasn't any more of a fighter than
he--but I was disappointed, somehow, that his pugnacity had died out so
readily.
"I can't do it, 'fresh,'" he confessed, with a grin. "I'm not the
scrapper I thought I could be. I just want to go through college lazily,
happily, respectably--and all that. I wouldn't know how to make a rumpus
if I wanted to. But listen here." He pointed his finger at me sternly.
"If I were you, I wouldn't rest until I had made the fight and won it.
Fight it not only for yourself but for the hundred other Jewish fellows
in college. See that they get a square deal. See that they don't lose
out on all the things that make college worth while. A Jew is just as
good as anyone else, isn't he?"
"Yes," I answered him only faintly.
"Well, then, go ahead and prove that fact to the whole college world."
But, though I did not answer him, I knew that I was not any more able to
make the fight than he. Less able, perhaps, because I was more
handicapped. I made myself a thousand excuses as I sat there thinking it
over--I was not brave enough, that was all.
But one thing my acquaintanceship with Trevelyan did bring me. He was a
dabbler in light verse, and had been elected to the college funny paper.
He also contributed to the undergraduate literary magazine at
times--though he was a bit ashamed of being taken seriously. At any
rate, he encouraged me to go into these two activities.
Whether or not it was due entirely to his influence, or whether these
two college publications were broader and less exacting as to the
ancestry of contributors, my work for them was welcomed. Before the year
was over I had been elected an associate editor of the funny paper, and
had four articles accepted by the literary magazine--enough to put me
among the list of "probables" for election, next winter.
At the same time I went through a successful trial for membership in the
college dramatic association. I was not given a part in the annual play,
however. I made up my mind to consider this a just decision, and that I
had no right to impute it to anything other than my lack of talent. The
president of the association, however, met me at lunch hour one day and
made some rather lame remarks about the embarrassment to which the
"dramatics" would be put if I were in the cast.
"Yer see," he said, "we go on an annual tour. And we get entertained a
lot, yer see. And it's big social stunts in every city. And it's the
cream of society wherever we go--so, it'd be funny if--well don'tcher
see?"
"Yes," I admitted, "I do see. I see further than you do."
I was beginning to wonder if that fight that Trevelyan planned wouldn't
be worth while, after all.
XI
A MAN'S WORK
I talked to Trevelyan, too, of my interest in the work of Lawrence
Richards. Trevelyan had heard of him and of his settlement, and was
rather at sea to give an opinion about it. He was only mildly
enthusiastic.
"What's the use of bothering with things so far away from your college
life?" he protested lazily. "Of course, the idea of being useful to
people in need is splendid and all that. But somehow, it doesn't fit in
with college life."
"Why not? Why shouldn't it?" I argued.
He waved his hand as if to begin some generalization, but made no real
reply.
"Wait until you're through with college before you settle down to
manhood," he said a little later. "College is just the sport of kids,
after all."
It came to me--though I did not tell him so--of how, in the beginning, I
had thought of college as a place of full manhood--and of the misgivings
I had had, that perhaps, after all, college would be only another
stepping stone to that manhood. And so it was: just a stepping stone,
through brambles of prickly prejudice and childish pranks. When would it
come, that manhood?
"You know, Trev," I said to him hesitatingly, "I sometimes feel I am
much older than most fellows. Almost old enough to do a man's work."
He looked at me and laughed, refusing to take me too soberly. "You are
older," he admitted. "Only what do you call a man's work?"
I didn't know, and told him so. He seemed to consider it a triumph for
his own argument.
"See here," he said, "what's the use of all this stewing about the slums
and the wretched poor and that sort of thing, if you're just aching to
make trouble for yourself? If you want manhood, you'll reach it ten
times sooner if you'll slip into it comfortably, gracefully, lying
quietly on your back and floating--and not splashing too hard. You'll
never get anywhere if you insist on getting there with a rumpus."
I admired the studied grace of his similes, but had to confess that they
did not impress me as true. But, at the same time, I did not try to
explain any further to him how I felt.
That did not end the questioning for me, however. I even broached it to
Aunt Selina once, and she threw up her hands in despair. I think I did
it somewhat with the idea of seeing her do just that. It was beginning
to amuse me, how hopeless she thought I was.
So that was why I did not tell her of my intention to go, one evening,
to see Mr. Lawrence Richards at his East Side Settlement. But
immediately after supper, I bade my aunt good night, and answered her
suspicious query with the information that I was "bound for a social
affair." The answer seemed to reassure her and she gave me gracious
permission to go.
I took the subway to Spring street, walked across to the Bowery, and a
few blocks on the other side of it, came to the Settlement. It was in
the heart of a noisy crowded section, towering high above the shabby
buildings like a great, clean, shining bulwark.
Mr. Richards was at supper, I was told. A bright-eyed little Jewish boy,
neatly dressed and careful of speech, offered to show me the way to the
dining room on the fifth floor.
I had a hearty welcome from the Head Worker when he recognized me. He
was disappointed that I had already had my supper; made me sit down
beside him and introduced me to all his associates. They were mostly
young men, I was surprised to find; one of them told me that he had
graduated from one of the New England colleges only the year before.
Mr. Richards showed me all about the place, as he had promised he
would. Then he took me with him into his "den" as he called it--a little
room, just off the gymnasium, where he had his desk and filing cabinets
and books. He sat me down opposite him on a canvas-covered chair, and,
when he had gone over some reports which needed his signature, looked up
at me and smiled.
"Well," he said, "what's the trouble?"
"Oh, I didn't--well, how did you know there was any trouble?"
The smile broadened. "None of you ever come down here unless you are in
trouble. Trouble's a sort of bait that lands ambitious youths into doing
settlement work--and into coming to me for advice. They say I'm pretty
good at giving it. Why don't you try me?"
I did. I told him exactly how I felt: that I was growing impatient of
all the tomfoolery of college; that I wanted work more sure of manly
results, more broadening, more full of character. Then, too, I told him
of what Trevelyan had said, and he laughed at it merrily.
"Trevelyan?" he said. "Oh, yes, I know him. He belongs to my fraternity,
doesn't he? I've met him at one or another of our affairs. A good enough
fellow--a little too much money, and a little too easy with himself in
consequence. But he's a thorough gentleman at heart, isn't he?"
I almost gasped. He had summed up Trevelyan marvelously well in those
few words. He saw my wonderment and smiled.
"I've only met him once or twice," he said, "but I have the faculty of
knowing men. It's a faculty I have to have in this sort of work. It
depends so much on the human equation. I meet thousands of young men and
women every year--meet them, talk with them a little while, give them
the best I have to give in that short space--and like to think that,
even if I never see them again, I've helped them along a bit. That's all
that a settlement can do, after all."
Outside the door, in the gymnasium, we could hear the joyful shrieks of
a crowd of young boys playing basketball. From the upper floors came a
scraping of feet to tell that the clubs were beginning to meet for the
evening. From across the hall came the sound of young girls singing the
parts of a cantata--and this was all planned, all created by Lawrence
Richards who sat there at his desk and had a smile for each and everyone
who came before him.
"Don't think you're different from all the other fellows at the
university," he said to me. "You're not. You're all as much alike as a
row of pins. Your problems are youth's problems--and you needn't be
ashamed to have them, as long as you work them out to suit the best that
is in you. You've nothing definite in mind, have you?"
I said, "No." I only had an idea that he might be able to use me here at
the settlement in some capacity.
"There's a good deal in what Trevelyan said," he told me. "While you're
at college you might as well give college all that it needs of your time
and energy. College will surely pay you back. All the work that you do
on a team, for a college paper, for any of the undergraduate
organizations, will be just so much of a pledge on the part of your
college that she will honor you, give you power and position and the
opportunity to do bigger things. Don't you want those honors? Doesn't
that power mean anything to you?"
I could not answer him; I did not want to tell him that I thought myself
above these little things. He understood me, however, even in my
silence.
"They are things worth while," he said. "There is a senior society worth
'making,' if you can. It would be something to be proud of to be the
only Jew ever to have 'made' it. But it's more than an honor. That
senior society practically governs the student body--molds its thought,
holds sway over all campus opinion. Think what you could do if you were
a member of it. You could fight for the other Jewish boys, make things
easier and fairer for them--could spare them the unpleasant things you
had to bear. You could master all snobbery, could make the university a
place of real American democracy and gentlemanliness. Don't you think
that that's worth while?"
I admitted it was. I had not thought of it in that way.
"Now, this is what I suggest," he said. "It's getting near the end of
the term, and there's no use in your beginning any work down here at the
settlement while college is still in session. But when vacation begins,
I want you to come down here to live for a couple of months. I'll make
you a resident club-leader, and you'll have your full share of the best
sort of work." He paused a moment. "Will you come?"
"Will I? You bet I will!"
"Good! And in the meanwhile, take Trevelyan's advice--it's mine, to.
Stick to your college work and your college play, and don't bother about
the outside world for a while. That is your world--the college. Fight
hard in it. The whole world likes a stiff upper lip, and the college
world likes it best of all. And, sooner or later, Jew or Gentile, the
college world will repay you for all that you give it. If you go through
college shunning everyone, afraid of your own shadow, surly to the
approach of all who would be friendly to you, you will reap nothing but
loneliness and a bitter 'grouch.' If you loaf and play cards and hang
about the billiard parlors all day long, you won't make a friend worth
having, you won't gain anything worth remembering. If you work at your
studies only, you'll gain nothing but Phi Beta Kappa--and, for all its
worth, that'll mean nothing to you unless it brings along with it the
respect and good will of all the men from whom you wrested it. At
college as much as in any business office a smile will beget a smile,
willingness to work will reap willingness to reward--and Alma Mater, if
only you prove your love for her by working for her, will return your
love tenfold."
He reached over the desk and touched my arm.
"I don't mean to be just rhetorical," he continued. "I have been through
the same inner struggle and wonder and repugnance that you have--and I
know how deeply you feel it. Well, I worked blindly ahead at the things
that college gave me to work at--the football team and the newspaper and
all that--and soon enough I knew that I had been working into manhood by
the only right road. Manhood is a matter of disposition, not of work.
There's a place for manhood in your little college world. Go and find
that place--and give it all that is manly and courageous in you."
I left him, I confess, doubting his words a little to find that place of
which he spoke so feelingly.
Well, perhaps I would find it. Perhaps an opportunity would spring up
from out of the sing-song ordinariness of my daily life--and what would
I do then?
XII
THE HEART OF JUDEA
My promise to Mr. Richards brought more than one result. The first of
them was a serious quarrel with my Aunt Selina. Her horror at the idea
of my spending the summer at a slum-settlement was beyond curbing. She
had planned that I should accompany her and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen upon a
trip to Europe. They did not need me; they would be in no way dependent
on my company ... and I flatly declined. Aunt Selina, outraged at my
actual intentions, left for France a week earlier than she had
expected--and, in high indignation, gave me leave to do "whatever I
pleased by way of disgracing her reputation."
Her letter from the steamer warned me to bathe every day in very hot
water, lest I should be contaminated by the filth of that section of the
city which I had chosen for my summer home ... and to be sure and give
her warmest regards to that delightful Mr. Trevelyan!
I lost no time in moving into Mr. Richards' company at the East Side
settlement. I was given a room there which was small, dark, but neat
and comfortable enough. College had no sooner closed than I was settled
in it, ready for the two months of work which had been allotted me.
In return for my board and lodgings, the settlement demanded all my
time. There was hardly an hour which was not given to some sort of club
or class, rehearsal or supervision or gymnastic training. Almost
immediately after breakfast the playground work began; by noon I was
helping a crowd of little ragamuffins to forget the heat in the
splashing fun of the swimming pool, in the basement. In the afternoon
there were classes for young boys who needed tutoring--hungry-eyed,
eager little fellows who reminded me of what I must have been when I was
their age.
I would not have you believe that I was readily sympathetic with every
case I met. These boys and girls--though I rarely had to do with the
latter--were all Jewish. The appearance of some of them would perhaps
have justified my aunt's antipathy to the East Side. Those that were new
to the settlement, I noticed, were shabby, dull, rough of speech, surly
of manners. It would need a few weeks before I could see how subtle, yet
how fundamental, were the changes which the settlement would have
wrought in them.
I was shy, too, in the presence of so many boys: shy of their
hastily-offered friendship, their rushing eagerness to bring me into all
their schemes and boyish dreams. But I was still young enough to know
those dreams upon my own account: young enough to feel with little
Mosche, a cripple, who wanted so much to become an expert at the
swinging of Indian clubs, and who was forever dropping the heavy things
in clumsy weakness; young enough to realize how much his mother's love
meant to thirteen-year-old Frank Cohen, who had been caught stealing
fruit from a corner grocery and was "on parole."
But the feeling in itself was not enough, evidently. I must try and try
to make that feeling eloquent--to make these boys feel, in turn, the
sureness and helpfulness of my understanding. Sometimes it was torture.
It is harder to conquer shyness than to slap a dragon.
Mr. Richards saw this in me--watched the struggle, appreciated it. He
spoke of it to me, once, and I did not hesitate to tell him how I felt.
How inadequate, how chagrined and humbled in the face of all the poverty
and suffering which life down here disclosed.
"It was the same when I first came down here," he said to me in turn.
"But I gained courage. Thank God for that!"
He said it quietly, but there was a good deal of fervor in the tones. It
surprised me, somehow, because, I had never before heard him mention the
name of the Deity. It gave me a new question to ask.
"Why is it that you don't lay more stress on religion down here? Don't
the boys and girls need it?"
"Need it? Who doesn't?" A shadow crossed his face. His vivacity gave way
for a moment before deep thoughtfulness. "But they get all they need,
these kids. They are mostly all of them members of strictly orthodox
Jewish families. Religion is given them at all hours in their own homes.
Many of them get more of it than they can ever need. They get so much of
it that they flee from it, just anxious for the freedom of the streets
and the novelty of the bar room and the brothel and the gambling den. I
have made investigations. I know that half of the East Side boys who
land in the police court have been driven there by the religious
strictness of their parents."
"Mr. Richards," I began ... but stopped in dismay. What I had been about
to say was no more nor less than a hot, strong denial of his opinion. I
felt sure he was wrong--and yet it seemed humorous to me that I, who a
year ago, had hated all things Jewish, was now defending all the worth
and venerability of its ritual.
"I do not agree with you altogether," I said lamely. "But ... but still,
don't think I am a very enthusiastic Jew. Because I'm not."
"Aren't you? Why not?"
I did not answer--had no answer to make, in fact. I did not want to tell
him of my aunt, of her influence, of my own cowardice. But, looking at
me, I think he did guess something of the longing I had had ...
something of that strange night when I had stood outside the synagogue
and heard the music coming from within the depths of its golden haze.
For he put his hand on my shoulder and bade me think for a moment why I
was not a Jew in spirit as well as in name.
"You're not a snob," he said, trying to help me. "You're not thinking
that, because your religion is in the minority in the midst of a
Christian land, it is necessarily an ignominy to be a Jew--and to act as
one."
My silence held. I let him go on talking. "Anyhow, you need religion.
Every man does to a variable extent. I should feel sorry for the man who
didn't. And do you mind my telling you--" he paused only for a
second--"that you are one of those who need it most?"
I hung my head. He had hit so truly upon what was right, what was most
secret in me.... I could not ask him how he had guessed it, I remembered
his assertion that he knew men--all men--and saw now that he had not
been boasting.
He went on, presently, to explain that religion was a thing for the
fathers and mothers and rabbis to teach to the children--not for the
settlement to teach them. He knew that boys needed the guidance of
religion ... but he felt that it was supplied in even too large doses
already.
"The pity of it is," he said in closing, "that wherever Jewish children
turn away from the faith of their fathers, they have nothing to turn
towards next. They are at sea ..." he gave me another of his quick, deep
set glances ... "and that applies to rich and poor alike. Christians
forget their religion when they feel they have outgrown it ... because
they have lost interest in it. Jews forsake theirs but never forget it.
Under certain circumstances they grow impatient with it, slink from the
inconveniences which it entails ... but their hearts are always
desperate for the Faith. It is a hidden loneliness, a stifled longing to
them."
I thought of Aunt Selina and wondered if she had ever felt that
loneliness, that longing, as I had. I could hardly imagine her happy in
devoutness to Judaism. It was so comical, I laughed aloud ... and got up
and left Mr. Richards, lest he should ask me at what I was laughing.
It was his remark about Jewish children getting all the religion they
need which nettled me the most. I felt that I would like to go out upon
the streets and see for myself. The streets are the East Side's
parliament, its court of law and high opinion.
They were hot and glaring with the noonday sun when first I appealed to
them. Their pavements, white and littered with unspeakable confusion,
gave off a dancing wave of heat. Old women, squatting on their
doorsteps, their coarse wigs low upon perspiring foreheads, dozed and
woke and gabbled to each other and dozed again. Old men, with long grey
beards, long, tousled hair and melancholy eyes shuffled listlessly up
and down, stopping only to make way for playing children or to pat them
on the head. The gutters had their Jewish peddlers, each window its fat
Jewish matron who leaned upon a cushioned window-sill and gazed
apathetically at nothing. There was a Babel of Yiddish and Russian and
guttural English. At one corner there was a crap-game going on in full
sight of the policeman across the street. Young men of my age were in
it; youths with mean, furtive faces and laughs that were cruel and
raucous.
So this was Judea? This was where religion played too strong a part ...
where parents and rabbis taught so fully to their charges the word and
the comfort of God? It did not seem so to me. It seemed all hateful,
smeared, repellant. And, with the question unanswered, I fled from it.
But the next morning, in the settlement playground, something happened
which began the solution for me. It was an accident and I regretted it
for a long while, feeling that it was my fault.
I had been teaching little Frank Cohen some tricks on the horizontal
bar. Frank, the boy on parole for petty theft, was daring in this
gymnastic work. No sooner was my back turned on him than he tried one of
the tricks without my help. His fingers slipped, he fell heavily from
the bar to the ground. When we picked him up, his arm was found to be
broken.
We got him home in Mr. Richards' little run-about, and put the boy to
bed. The doctor set his arm and put it into splints. I met Frank's
mother here, and, later on, his father who, having heard of the
accident, came rushing upstairs from his bakery shop. They were a
nervous, frightened pair; and it needed all the talk my lungs were
capable of to assure them that their son would soon recover the use of
his arm and be out of his bandage.
As I left their stuffy little flat, they were reciting some Hebrew
prayers of gratitude. Tears were on the cheeks of both of them, and
their eyes were uplifted to a God I could not know. I went downstairs
bitterly conscious of that.
And this was why, when Frank Cohen, pale, his arm in a sling, but the
hero of his comrades, came again to the settlement, I sought him out and
made an especial friend of him. Of what that friendship should become I
had then no plan.
XIII
CHILD AND PARENT
One hot evening, when the fire-escapes were crowded with hundreds of
sleeping children, and the streets were shrieking canyons of heated
stone and iron, and men and women lay in the grass of little parks,
breathing heavily as if in prayer for coolness, I learned the secret in
the heart of young Frank Cohen.
He was sitting beside me in the amateur roof-garden which Mr. Richards
had contrived atop the settlement. We had wicker chairs there, a few
potted palms and a solitary, tiny goldfish in a small glass bowl. That
was the extent of its furnishings; but in the later afternoons the old
Jewish mothers would come and sit here and doze in the sun, grateful for
the breeze, city-fed and redolent, which might carry relief towards
them.
This afternoon Frank's mother had been among them. I had seen her there,
a pale, little woman who sat with her sewing in her lap, staring dully
out over the roofs below her. I had been detailed to go around among
these women and to make them as comfortable as I could. Hardly a one,
however, could understand English; and Frank's mother, when I came to
her, took no notice of anything that I said or mentioned. She looked at
me from under lowered eyebrows. Later on Mr. Richards, who had had her
under his attention for some months, told me how frightened she had been
by her son's misdemeanor--it had been no more than that, according to
the police report--and it was easy to imagine that she looked with
suspicion upon every comrade whom Frank followed, now. The fact that I
was so much older and was a member of the staff of the settlement
workers was not enough to overcome the whole of her distrust.
And when the evening came, and Frank and I had emerged from one of the
club meetings--for he was president of his particular club of boys of
his own age--hot and tired from wrangling over Robert's Rules of Order
and the wording of a baseball challenge to be sent to a rival
organization, he told me the entire story of that misdemeanor. He would
not speak of it readily. He too felt the shame of it, differently of
course, but no less heavily. He had been in bad company. He had been
going for months with some sons of one of the East Side's notorious
gamblers--boys who were wise beyond their years and brutal beyond their
strength. Cowardly, sneaky, they had prompted him to steal things at the
counters of all the shops on their street. He had never realized, under
their whispered urgings, how wrong it was--and he had never had a chance
to profit by his thefts himself. The petty business had gone on for a
couple of weeks, the other boys praising him, bullying him by turn, and
dividing the loot between them. And when the inevitable happened and
Frank found himself locked for the night in a police court, frantic at
the disgrace which the loathsome night exaggerated, these boys informed
against him.
When he told me of this, and how they had come snivelling before the
police lieutenant, and had lied to make that fat, gruff, old master
believe that Frank had stolen even more than he actually had, and all
for the sake of becoming the chief of their "gang"--then his narrow face
darkened and writhed with a hate that was too great for him to bear--and
presently tears came into his black eyes.
"Were they Jewish boys?" I asked him. "No," he answered passionately. "I
think I should have gone crazy if they had been."
I glanced at him quickly. He did not smile as he said it, nor was there
anything too melodramatic about his manner.
"Why do you say that? That you would have gone crazy?"
"Don't you see? You're a Jew, ain't you?"
I said, "Yes."
"Well, I couldn't talk about it to you at all if you wasn't. And if they
had been Jews--my own people--and had gone back on me like that, it
would've been just a little too much. They were just tough kids--and so
they didn't know any better. If they had been Jews they wouldn't have
taught me to steal, they wouldn't have done what they--God, my father
and mother were right about it, for sure!"
"Your father and mother? Why, what had they to do with it?"
"Oh, you know how parents are. They used to warn me against going with
those tough kids. They seemed to know from the beginning that
something'd happen out of it. They said--you know, it's like old
folks--that Christian boys would never want to go with me unless to gain
their own ends--and then to desert me, see? They wanted me to go with
the Jewish boys I'd been going with all my life, before then. But I
laughed and didn't listen. And--and when I had to pay back for all the
things I stole, it was--well, it was the Jewish boys I knew who clubbed
together and earned money by odd jobs after school--and if it wasn't for
them, I'd be in the workhouse."
"But all Christian boys aren't like the ones you went with," I argued.
"No, I suppose not. But I like to think that all Jewish boys are like
the ones on this street. They made a good Jew of me!"
I turned on him quickly. "Did they? How?"
"They made me proud of being one of them. They made me feel the close
something-or-other--well, I ain't much when it comes to speeches but you
know what I mean."
Perhaps I did, but I would not admit it to myself. Perhaps I did see the
faith reborn in him through the faith that other boys had given him.
Perhaps, too, I could picture something of the welling joy that had come
to his parents when he returned to the only right path that their
simple, unquestioning eyes could see. And how jealously they must be
guarding him now, to keep him in that code which was their life's law
and had become his daily lesson!
"Don't you see?" he begged. "Can't you? Why, a fellow's just _got_ to
have a side to fight on--and to fight for. And he's got to believe that
his side is the only one, the right one. Life wouldn't be worth living
without it. You don't know what it means to be _fighting for the
right_!"
From below came the droning of the unquiet streets. A little higher up a
hot wind went almost noiselessly among the chimneys, so that we heard
but faint sighs. The roof garden was in darkness, naught gleaming but
the little glass bowl of gold fish. There was a sense of utter darkness
and loneliness--and yet into it had come, like the glad, brave blast of
New Year's trumpet, a battle cry of the One God. A battle cry which made
throb the heart of a young, rough boy; a battle cry which would be his
whole life's secret well of gratitude and bravery.
"_You don't know what it means to be fighting for the right!_"
He was so slight, so meagre in appearance, that I could not help finding
something gently humorous about his utterance. But when I looked at him
and saw how his eyes glowed through the dark, and how he stood straight
and at full height, his narrow shoulders thrown back, in spite of his
bandaged arm, and his face upraised to the summer stars, my smile passed
quickly.
There came over me that same queer panging sense of being only on the
outside of things--only on Life's outermost border. I was looking
straight into the heart of a boy and seeing the gladness which blazed
there--and yet I could not have it, as he had it. Here was this sudden,
all-forgetting boldness of belief which he had won--and I could only
watch it covetously through the bars of my exiled doubts.
No, no, he was right--a thousand times more right than I. If faith in
the One God did all of this for him, then that faith was surely
justified.
And if I could only bring myself to believe as deeply, as powerfully as
he did--then my whole life would be remade as his had been--and I, too,
would fight for what I must believe: would fight--_for the right_!
I did not let him talk any further, but sent him home. I did not want
his parents to be worrying as to where he was, this time of night. I
stayed on a little while, looking over the roofs and the white-faced
huddlings of the fire-escapes, and then I went to bed, to toss with heat
and battle with my thoughts throughout the night.
When the morning came, I went early to Frank's house. The pavements were
fresh and damp with the water of a sprinkling cart, and the shops, just
beginning to open, had a Sabbath air of cleanliness. It was cooler than
yesterday, too, and the street corners were still cleared and quiet.
I had been granted permission to take Frank and two other boys on a
picnic to Westchester. He was ready for me when I knocked at his door,
and let me into the darkened kitchen.
His mother was there, too, cutting bread for sandwiches which we would
take along. Her old morning wrapper and her hastily-shawled head gave
her an even more forbidding appearance than ever. But when her
sandwiches were packed into a box and wrapped and tied, she wiped her
hands on a towel and looked at me steadfastly, not unkindly, for fully a
minute.
I could not understand what she said. It was in Yiddish, and I have
never learned that tongue. But here and there I caught a word which gave
me enough of her meaning.
She was telling me that Frank had spoken to her of me last night when he
returned from the blessed settlement. He always came to her bedside,
nowadays, knowing that she would be awake and waiting to hear where he
had been. And so he had whispered, while his father slept, of the
strange young man who was so kind--a Jew, like them--and yet who had no
faith in God.
Then suddenly she began to beg something. "Mutter, mutter," was all I
could make of it--and I guessed that she was asking me of my mother, and
wondering why I did not listen at her knee as Frank had done at his own
mother's. And when I told her that my mother was dead, tears came into
her eyes, and this was the finest sympathy I had ever known.
For she put her big, buttery hand on mine and shook her head. "You must
learn to know God," I think she said. "He alone can take your mother's
place. He made my son what I longed he should be. He will make you what
you most desire. In God alone is there happiness."
And so Frank and I went out and down the dirty, narrow stairs, and came
into a street of Heaven itself--a street of early sunlight, and a clear
sky above--and morning smiles upon the faces of all passersby. Or so it
seemed to me, at any rate.
Because, for once in my life, I had seen the happiness of mother and
child swept up into glory that is God's.
And I laughed to think of Mr. Richard's remark that religion works harm
among these East Side people.
XIV
AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW
The summer came to an end only too quickly. I had enjoyed every moment
of it, every opportunity. I had built up three clubs of which I was
personal leader; I had given service in the gymnasium and playground; I
had helped in the development of a roof-garden cordiality between the
settlement workers and the mothers of children on the street. Mr.
Richards, the last night I was there, presented me with a loving-cup on
behalf of the other workers.
It was at supper that he did this, in front of them all. He called upon
me, then, to describe to them the most interesting experience I had had
in the course of the summer. So I told them the incident of Frank Cohen
and his mother--but I do not think they saw much that was interesting
about it. Mr. Richards may have, perhaps, because he must have
remembered that dictum of his which the incident disproved; but even he
could guess little of the impression it had made upon my thought and
character.
I had had a letter from my Aunt Selina, to tell me curtly that she was
back in New York, but intended starting out immediately upon an
automobile tour through New England into Canada, in company with Mrs.
Fleming-Cohen and some ship-board acquaintances--"personages," she
called them in her much underlined letter, which probably meant that she
had succeeded in capturing some stray society folk. She bade me go back
to our apartment and to have it ready for her on her return. The
servants, she said, were already there, engaged in cleaning away the
summer's dust. She hoped "I would be able to start the college year
without her, and that I would comport myself on the campus in a manner
creditable and befitting, etc., etc."
But in spite of the servants' efforts to make things bright and
comfortable, the apartment was a dismal and lonely place. College kept
me uptown all day long, of course, but when the evening came and I must
return to the big, empty rooms that were our substitute for home, I did
not like it. I began to linger more and more about the campus at night:
it was truly the most beautiful time to be there, when the autumn moon
silvered its lawns and gave the buildings a marble whiteness. There was
singing on the fences, then, and all sorts of meetings of all kinds of
college organizations. The campus hummed with a hundred undergraduate
activities--so that I saw, as never before, how much I missed through
having to go downtown each night to live. But so long as my aunt wanted
it, I felt I owed it to her to obey, and would not even consider the
renting of Trevelyan's suite of rooms in the principal dormitory.
Trevelyan had given up these rooms to move into his fraternity house.
"It's a dreadful bore," he said to me in his lazy, rueful way. "I'd be
ten times more comfortable here--but I don't want to insult the
brothers. However, you'll come up to the house and see me just as often,
won't you?"
I promised him I would, but he seemed to know as well as I that I would
not. A sophomore paying nightly visits to a senior in the fraternity
house where that sophomore had only a year ago been smiled politely
out--no, it didn't seem even probable. And so, when I had helped
Trevelyan put his last bit of furniture upon a truck--and had tucked
among the rungs of many Morris chairs the bundle of flags and college
shields which he had overlooked--I could hardly bear to shake hands with
him. We both knew that it was something in the nature of a definite
goodbye; at any rate, so far as college was concerned.
"A damned nuisance, this," he said thickly, his short-sighted eyes
screwing up oddly. "And if it wasn't for the brothers--" But the
brothers did win him, and I lost a friend thereby.
The home to which I must go seemed lonelier than ever now. I was not
expecting Aunt Selina for two more weeks, and so I hit upon the idea of
inviting some one to stay with me until then.
Frank Cohen! Yes, I would ask Frank Cohen. He was going to high school
now, and the branch which he attended was not so far from where I lived.
It would be convenient for him, and perhaps a happy change from the East
Side crowdedness which he had had to encounter all his life.
He was as glad to come as I to have him. I gave him Aunt Selina's room
to sleep in, and we sat there, when our homework was done, many evenings
until past midnight, talking gently and thoughtfully of many things. He
was a boy much as I had been--and perhaps, still was. He was shy to an
uncomfortable degree, low of voice, dreamy in manner. But when he was
aroused to something especial, he became uncontrollably intense, his
eyes flashing and his knees trembling, so that his whole small body
seemed but the sheer vibration of his thoughts.
He was hoping to go to college, when his high school days were over. He
had not dared mention it at home, though, because he knew how poor his
father was, and how much of a help he would be when he could go to work
and begin to carry home his weekly earnings. He hated to go into a
shoddy little business; he wanted to study further, to take up some
profession--perhaps the law. Or if he did go into business, he wanted to
have had a few years of college first, so that he might see things
broadly and with a mind trained for bigness. But he had only dreamed all
this, only longed for it in secret. He would rather forego all of it
than urge his father to make the big sacrifice.
I had come to be so fond of him, it was not long before I decided upon
what seemed to be a proper solution. Without a word to Frank, I escaped
from college early one afternoon and went downtown to that East Side
street where he lived. I found his father in the cellar of the bakery
shop which he owned, his beard all whitened with flour dust, his thin,
bare arms thick with the paste of dough.
With rehearsed gesticulations I made him understand what I offered. My
own father had left me fairly well off; I wanted to lay out the money
which would be necessary to afford Frank a college education. They could
pay it back when they pleased--not for many years would I need it.
I had a distinct surprise, then. My generosity was taken somewhat aback
by the man's apparent anger. He seemed to be resenting any suggestion of
charity. I tried to assure him that this was not what I intended, but he
did not understand. At length we had to call in one of the bakery's
oven-tenders to act as interpreter. And through this third party Mr.
Cohen thanked me kindly. He appreciated all I offered, but he had long
ago made arrangements for Frank.
"And what are those arrangements?" I asked anxiously, picturing the boy
at work in this dark, mouldy cellar.
"It is a secret," said Mr. Cohen. "But it is time now for me to disclose
what his mother and I have planned for him. For ten years we have saved.
And we have saved enough to send him to college. He shall go there and
we ourselves shall send him." He drew himself up as he said it, so that
I had a glimpse of that pride which all Jewish fathers seem to take in
hardships which they undergo for their children. "It is so with the son
of the president of my synagogue," he said. "It shall be no less so with
my son, either. He shall have what his father could not have, though his
father starve and slave to give it to him!"
The dull interpreter gave me this in flat, spiritless tones; but I could
see the clenched hands and the earnest face of Mr. Cohen, and I nodded
quickly.
"I am very glad," I told him. "And I know it will mean ten times more in
happiness to you because you are giving him all this with your own
hands. Frank said to me he dared not ask it of you--he thought the
sacrifice too great--and that is why I came to you with my offer. Do not
think me rude, therefore."
He answered gravely. I was not rude, he assured me, and he owed me deep
thanks. He had only one favor to ask; that I should not tell Frank the
secret, but would leave it and the joy that it would bring, for him, his
father. He would tell him immediately after Frank had returned home from
his stay at my apartment.
I hurried home, for it was now nearly suppertime. To my amazement I
found Frank sitting in the lobby of the apartment, his old suitcase
beside him, his look one of fevered disconsolement.
"What's the trouble?" I asked him.
"Oh, I just wanted to say goodby to you," he said hurriedly. "I did not
want to go without doing that. I've--I've had a pleasant time."
"But why are you going?"
"Oh, I want to be home ... you know, I get a little homesick." But he
said it so stumblingly that I was sure he was not telling me all.
"Frank," I demanded, "tell me the truth. Has anything gone wrong? I had
hoped you would stay until my aunt returned."
He laughed at that, and mystified me the more. "Have any of the servants
offended you in any way?" I asked, searching my brain for some reason
for his change of attitude.
"The servants? Oh, no, of course not!" He picked up his suitcase and
started for the street. "Well, goodby," he said. He stopped as if he
wanted to explain, then thought better--or worse--of it, and went on. I
was a little nettled by this time, and let him go.
As I went up in the elevator, it seemed to me a mighty mystery. But no
sooner had I let myself into the apartment than I was due for a bigger
surprise.
For there, blocking the hallway, a figure of offended pride, stood Aunt
Selina.
I went to her to kiss her, but she stepped back and glared into my face.
"It's a lucky thing I came back unexpectedly," she said. "The idea of
finding a little Jew boy like that in my room--sitting in my own bedroom
with his copy books spread all over my directoire desk! A common little
boy with an accent!"
I saw it all, now.
"That boy was one of my best friends," I told her as calmly as I could.
"Had I thought you would have objected to his presence here, I would
never have invited him to stay with me for these weeks."
"Weeks? What, you have had that little East Side creature here for
weeks?" She began to walk up and down the hall in feline fury. "Haven't
you any idea of what is proper? Here I go away with some of the most
cultured and well-known society people in New York--an absolute
triumph--and you use my home as a refuge for nasty little scum of the
slums. It isn't bad enough for you to spend your summer in such
disgusting company. You have to cap it all by bringing them up into my
own home. Think of the disgrace it would mean if any of these new
friends of mine were to discover it!"
"I have my own friends to consider," I told her patiently. "And this boy
is one of them. What did you tell him?"
"Tell him? What should I tell him?" She made a great show of shuddering.
"I told him to get out. To--to get out as fast as he could."
I looked at her evenly for as long a while as she could stand it. Then
her miserable pose gave way to pettishness, and she cried:
"And what's more, you'll have to get out yourself, if you insist on
trying any more of these outrageous things. I can't bear it, that's
all. You'll have to get out before you disgrace me!"
"I shall," I agreed, and, passing her, went into my own room and began
to pack.
We had a silent, sullen supper. At the end of it I told her that my
clothes were packed and that I intended moving on the morrow to
Trevelyan's empty suite, up at college. I would take none of the
furniture from my room, however, since I did not wish to inconvenience
her. I would not trouble her at all after tonight.
She may have thought this was pure bragging, she may have been
reconciled to it. At any rate she made no answer, and let me go to my
room without a word of comment.
And it was only two weeks later, when I was comfortably settled in my
room on the campus, that I received a stormy letter from her, calling me
a "most ungrateful monster of a nephew."
XV
COLLEGE LIFE
Across the hall from Trevelyan's rooms lived one of the college
"grinds." Now that I had moved there and came and went at all hours of
the day, I saw this man often.
Fallon--that was his name--stood fully six-feet four, and had about a
thirty-two-inch waist. He stooped until his thin shoulder blades were at
directly right angles to each other. He would never talk to any one he
met on his way; his nose was always deep in the book which he held
outspread. He was the most ferocious grind I have ever known.
Next to Fallon lived Waters, a cheery, well-dressed little person, who
had pink cheeks and no disturbing thoughts. Waters was a member of one
of the minor fraternities; he spoke longingly of the day when he would
be living in his "chapter lodge." Waters was easy company. He had four
hundred "friends" around the campus, and when I met him was engaged in
capitalizing on those friendships by canvassing votes for his election
to a team managership.
That perhaps is why he came into my room so often to sit and chat
pleasantly, lightly, about almost every topic known to the college man.
He was very much of a type. There were at least thirty other men in that
class who were like him, no better nor worse, nor more nor less
attractive than he was. Popularity was an end and a means with him. It
was all he wanted of college.
"Well, how are you, old top?" was the greeting that came singing from
his room, each time I passed its open door. It was a door perennially
open, lest some passerby might escape without the greeting.
"D'you know, old chap," he'd say, sweeping into my room in the midst of
a study-hour and slumping down upon the divan with a great show of silk
socks and shirtings, "it's high time you and I did something for that
'grind' across the hall."
He was tremendously interested in Fallon, it would appear. Not
personally, he explained to me--but just because Fallon might become a
valuable friend in time. A college man needed friends--and he, Waters,
had only four hundred of them!
Fallon, however, had something of his own opinion about it. He went
about the building with his book before him, bowing neither to me nor
Waters nor any one else. It was dreadful to have to speak to him. He
could scarcely answer; his big Adam's-apple would go juggling painfully
up and down, and finally he would succeed in emitting a barely audible
whisper. He would blush, stammer, clap his mouth shut, then hurry away.
That was Fallon, worst of "grinds." He was beginning to be the butt of
all sorts of miserable jokes. Even the freshmen over-stepped the line to
make fun of him. For, like Waters and myself, he was a sophomore.
In the guise of helping a classmate, Waters took charge of him. He gave
him nightly lectures in cordiality, in self-confidence, in the bettering
of one's appearance. Once, when I chanced to go by, I heard him
delivering glib advice upon what "Fallon, old top" ought to eat, in
order that he might grow stouter and more favorable to look upon. And
Fallon sat through it all and clutched his bony knees and grinned the
grin of the helpless.
But one day, the story goes, he surprised Waters by finding his
voice--and a very full-toned, convincing voice it proved to be, not at
all like his usual whisper. And he told Waters to keep out of his room
in study hour; he told him that he did not care to have his chances of
becoming class valedictorian spoiled through having to divert his
attention and listen to such superficial tommy-rot. And he told him to
keep himself away, now and forever more, from his room and its owner.
"Oh, very well!" I heard the injured Waters say. A second later he had
come across into my room and was pouring into my ear a complaint
concerning the beggarly rudeness of that "grind, Fallon, who never would
amount to anything in the college world, anyhow!"
He had just returned from a very important meeting, he told me, for the
express purpose of having that heart-to-heart talk with Fallon--and the
big, uncouth beggar didn't appreciate it at all. No wonder some fellows
never did get along in college--and here he was, absent from this most
important meeting, with no results at all.
He didn't mind telling me--(here his voice died down into an impressive
whisper)--that it was from a fraternity meeting he had come. They were
great things, these fraternity meetings. It was really too bad that I
had never been able to join a fraternity--but then, of course, I must
realize that fraternities had to draw the line somewhere! Now, I mustn't
take that as a reflection on me personally--because it wasn't. I was all
right, I was--and some day, he was sure, I was going to be a big man in
the college world--bigger than he himself ever hoped to be. But Jews
were a funny people--and I must admit, if I wanted to be fair, that some
of them weren't fit to come to college at all, not to speak of joining
fraternities.
And so he went on, until, thoroughly nauseated by the bland niceness of
his speech, I followed Fallon's example and threw him out, though he
refused to be insulted at this move, and promised to come around the
next night and discuss the question of who should be elected our next
football manager.
A little while after he was gone, Fallon came across the hall and
knocked at my door. It was a timid, scared sort of a knock, and it
needed a loud and repeated, "Come in," before he finally obeyed my
summons.
He was pitifully wrought up over the incident. He had wanted to be
polite to Waters, but he had had to study. He hadn't wanted to insult
him, but somehow Waters never did understand how valuable time was, and
what it would mean to Fallon's mother if he could come out a
valedictorian at the end of our four years.
"Which would you rather have," I asked him, "a valedictory or a friend?"
He stammered a good deal over it. He knew that Waters was right about
that: he did not have a single friend in the whole college--didn't know
how to go about it--but he didn't want such men as Waters trying to
teach him the way either.
That began my friendship for Fallon. I had acquaintances enough on the
campus, but I was almost as friendless as he--for friendlessness, I
think, is not so much a matter of other people's as of one's own habit
of mind. And there was something so grotesquely miserable about his
loneliness--something so like a grinning gargoyle, solitary in its
elevation--that I was drawn to him without much conscious effort.
I began by taking him for long walks. It was the first exercise of any
sort, outside of the required freshman gymnasium course, which he had
had in college. At first he would not talk at all; would just walk
beside me through the city's fringes into the half-suburban roads, his
eyes drinking in the green vistas as if they were astounding novelties,
his breath coming fast with exertion, his cheeks glowing with new color.
Gradually I urged him into talking--and, like all beginners, he talked
of himself entirely. It was good for him. The more he spoke of himself,
the more highly he thought of himself. He needed pride.
I had already been elected an editor of the college joke paper. I was
qualified, therefore, to persuade Fallon to contribute what he could to
that periodical. But he had not a jot of humor, and his contributions
turned out to be very long and serious bits of verse in studied French
rhyme schemes. I did not even risk reading them at a meeting of the
board, but always turned them over to Trevelyan who could have them used
in the coming issue of the other magazine, the literary monthly. This
set Fallon writing entirely for the "lit," as we called it--and, as a
result, when the elections to that paper were announced in the middle of
the sophomore year, Fallon's name and mine stood together.
But the happiest inspiration came to me one Sunday when at noon Fallon
and I were resting atop the Palisades, whither we had gone upon an
all-day tramp. I watched him pick up a flat rock and sent it sailing out
and down through space. His long thin arm gave the toss a surprising
power.
I asked him, had he ever seen a discus. He said, "No."
The next day I had overcome all his scruples as to the immodesty of a
track costume and had led him out upon the field to practice with the
discus. It was hard work, because he was by far the clumsiest man I have
ever known. Later on I interested the old coach on his behalf. Before
Thanksgiving Fallon gave promise of becoming one of the college's best
discus throwers.
When winter began, I took him down to the gymnasium. At first I had in
mind only to keep him in good condition; but his handling of the heavy
medicine ball gave me another idea. I put him to work with a
basketball--and here the training I had given the young boys at the
settlement served me in good stead. He was so tall, he need only swing
up his arms to drop the ball into the basket. He was the ideal build for
a "center," and our 'varsity team needed a center.
He did not make the 'varsity--not that year, anyhow. But he did make our
class team, and won his numerals.
Also when spring came in, he was chosen as one of the track team's
discus throwers. Add to this the fact that he had lately been elected to
the board of the literary monthly, and it will be seen that Fallon had
had a skyrocket rise. No wonder that Waters, the genial, now forgot that
autumn affront and paid nightly visits upon his particular friend
Fallon. And Fallon, of course, having had his attention diverted into so
many foreign channels, no longer cared so singularly for his studies,
but was willing to receive Waters and such as Waters with an
ever-increasing cordiality.
The inevitable happened. Fallon, exhibiting his latest development--a
full-sized, roistering swagger--came into my room one evening and told
me jubilantly that he was pledged to join Waters' fraternity.
"It's not the best in college," he admitted loftily, "but it'll tone up
a bit when I get the track captaincy and Waters gets elected to a
managership."
"And how about that senior year valedictory?" I asked him.
"Oh, I was a fool in those days, wasn't I?"
He mistook my silence. "Say, old chap," he went on, "this is no time for
you to be jealous of me. I know well enough, you ought to be in a
fraternity--in the very best one. I wish I could get you into ours--but,
say, you know how it is about Jews."
Yes, I knew, I assured him, and gave him the heartiest hand-clasp I
could manage.
"You know, my mother's going to be awfully proud of this," he exclaimed
huskily.
But though Waters did succeed in winning himself a team managership,
Fallon never became the captain of the track team. For his election to
that fraternity meant his ruin. He lost his grip upon everything.
Perhaps it was his fellow-members, perhaps he had only himself to blame.
He began to drink. At the end of junior year he was expelled from
college.
And I wondered if the mother, who had wanted him to be the class
valedictorian, was as proud of him as ever.
XVI
THE HUN'S INVASION
So far in my college course I had met with actually little outspoken
insult. Once or twice in my freshman year some loutish sophomore had not
stopped at making comments upon my religion. There had been that
incident at Trevelyan's fraternity house, too. But, generally speaking,
the prejudice had been of a negative sort, restricting rather than
driving--though none the less offensive and chafing on that account.
There was nothing on which I could actually lay my finger to complain. I
had no actual proof that I had been kept off any college organization
because of my religion. I might have had, had I cared at the time to
follow up the favoritism shown in the dramatic society--but that was a
small affair, by now, and I preferred to let it rest forgotten.
Otherwise, I was treated with a fair amount of kindness by almost all of
the college. The members of my own class, in which I was gradually
acquiring such positions as work and merit could win me, had begun to
show me a good, clean respect; and those in the class above soon
followed their lead. All that I asked was fair play, and the chance to
overcome that handicap which I knew existed. This was easier, now that I
lived at college, and I gave to the various activities in which I was
interested, all the spare time which I could afford from my studies. I
was beginning to realize what that preachment meant: "The college will
give you back all that you give to it in work."
Thus, at the end of my sophomore year, when I again went to the
settlement for the summer, I was planning big and enthusiastic things
for the autumn term.
Mr. Richards placed me in charge of one of the settlement's fresh-air
camps, up the state. I had two other boys to help me in my work, and one
of them was Frank Cohen. It had taken me a long time to overcome Frank's
sensitiveness, after his encounter with my aunt; but we were fast
friends again now, and it was good to have him with me where I could
help him with his daily noon-time studying for his "preliminaries." When
the fall came, he passed them easily--and it was now definitely decided
that he would enter my college when I was a senior.
My own return to the university, however, gave me an unpleasant shock. I
had arrived a few days late, because I had wanted to help Mr. Richards
with some of his coming year's programs. The campus was already alive
and crowded, therefore, and the dormitory windows were all thrown open
and overflowing with the rugs and chair cushions of autumn cleaning. The
campus teemed with a thousand youths who grasped each other cordially by
the wrist and went through all sorts of contortions to prove that they
"were glad to see you, old man!"
But there was a difference! The first glimpse I had of it, I called
myself a self-conscious fool. I tried to reassure myself, everybody's
greeting had been as cordial as I could expect. Everybody had said he
was glad to see me--and--yet!
Then, the second day that I was at college, I had my first proof of the
truth of my suspicions. I had it through eavesdropping--but I was
justified. For I heard little Waters, the genial popularist, talking of
it to another classmate in front of the laboratory steps.
"It's a rotten shame," he was declaiming. "Haven't you noticed? I don't
see how it could escape you! Jews and Jews! The freshman class is just
swarming with 'em!"
"What? Really?"
"Honestly. If there's one Jew in the freshman class, there are fifty.
And such Jewy-looking Jews!"
"Gee whizz, it's a disgrace. It was bad enough when they used to come in
four or five--or even ten--in a class. But fifty! Are there really
fifty?"
"Oh, easily! Maybe a hundred--I don't know. They are swarming all over
the place! Gosh, we'll have to do something to get rid of them. It just
simply ruins the college name to have so many of them around."
"You bet! A campaign for ours!"
I watched them going off together, arm in arm, towards "fraternity
row"--and wondered what that campaign would be.
It did not take me long to investigate the real state of affairs. There
were some thirty members of the freshman class listed in the dean's
office under the designation of "Jew," "Hebrew" or "Ethical Culturist."
And the faces that I met under freshman caps were certainly Semitic, to
a large percentage.
At first it annoyed me. Annoyed me more, too, when the first member of
the freshman class to be expelled for ungentlemanly conduct was a Jew.
There were one or two others, I noticed, who would sooner or later reach
the same end if they did not keep away from the city at night--and from
the things the city teaches.
These one or two gradually became scape-goats for the rest of the Jewish
boys in the class. They were sons of rich fathers; they paraded their
automobiles about the campus--and thus broke the rule number one in the
"freshman bible." They had unbridled tongues, and used them
ungraciously. One of them, a big, swaggering chap, "went out" for his
class football team--and, having been selected to play in a minor game,
developed a dying aunt overnight and disappeared for the day. When he
came back, on Sunday night, he was caught and hazed. His automobile was
dumped on its side in the middle of the campus. His face, when I saw him
the next day, was a network of plaster strips. Three days after that he
left college--and I, for one, was devoutly thankful for his resigning.
He did not belong in our college, had done nothing to fit himself into
its environment, had talked loudly, acted the cad and the coward--and
had reaped the reward of such a person, Jew or Gentile, in whatever
community.
The persecution--for it had taken on proportions worthy of that
name--went forward, however. There was an annual "freshman parade," for
instance, when the entering class was dressed in grotesque costumes and
sent marching in and out a lane of laughing spectators to the football
field. In my own freshman year this was a good-natured affair--and each
class, including the victimized one, took it for the boisterous joke
that it was.
But this year, when the parade was starting at the gymnasium, and the
big, card-board placards were being lifted to the marchers' shoulders, I
noticed that all the Jewish boys were being put conspicuously into one
group. They would march together. And those placards! The sickening
succession of them was only a repetition of "Oi oi" and the pawnbroker's
symbol--and humor of that high order. And these Jewish freshmen went
down the street amid the jeering--and I had to stand by and see them,
some with heads high and eyes blazing with pride, others stumbling and
bowed, one of them with tears running inanely down his cheeks--had to
stand there and watch it all, and curse myself for a coward because I
would not, could not, go out into the middle of the road and tear down,
one by one, the daubed, cheap jests that they had to carry.
A few weeks later there was another such celebration. There were
speeches to be made. The class wits--and what class is without
them?--were to have their turn.
And their wit--what did it consist of? One after another, they made
blunt, exaggerated references to the "invasion of the Huns," to the
"Jews coming unto Jordan," to "the lost Ten Tribes ..." and hoots of
applause went up to the night sky like the roar of a Philistine army!
One of the men who spoke was a classmate of mine--a fellow-member of
the joke paper's board. I knew him well, for he had been to see me
often. It was only a few nights ago that he had told me he was chosen to
speak at this celebration, and had promised me he would make no
reference to the Jewish influx.
"I don't agree with you about it," he had said. "You're too sensitive,
all you Jews--and anyhow, you know perfectly well we're not aiming this
campaign at you personally. It's against this big bunch of them in the
freshman class."
"So it's a regular campaign, is it?" I demanded.
He evaded the question--but satisfied me with his promise.
But when I heard him break it--heard him, more than any other speaker,
launch one smiling epithet after another against the "sons of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob," I lost all the gnawing consciousness that I had had as
to the justice of this remark about Jewish sensitiveness--and I went
forward to the cart-end from which he was speaking. I meant to pull him
down and get up there in his place, and to speak hotly, straight from
the shoulder--I didn't care what I said so long as I put them all to
disgrace!
But when I was within a few feet of him in the jostling, laughing crowd,
I could go no further. I tried to cry out, but that was denied me. My
courage gave me only the power to glare and sneer at him--and once, as
he spoke, he looked down and saw my face, I think. For his own grew
paler in the light of the gas lantern which flared windily beside him,
and he faltered in his speech.
Later on he came over to my room and asked to speak to me. I heard him
through; listened to his smooth explanation about the committee of
arrangements demanding that he put something into his speech about the
Jews--and he was sorry he had broken his word to me--only, of course, I
was to consider myself an exception to all this sort of thing. Everybody
knew I was a good fellow and was doing bully work for the name of the
college--and what right had I to class myself with these insignificant
little Jews in the Freshman class? and he didn't want it to break up our
friendship, because he thought the world of me.
And so I showed him the door.
The next day I began to pay for that stroke of arrogance. The classmates
who belonged to that man's fraternity snubbed me on the street.
It didn't matter much, I thought--but in reality, it did. Because these
men, as it happened, had been my closest friends. I was beginning to
worry myself into a maudlin state, and no doubt did attribute hostility
to altogether too many of the undergraduates. But it is hard to choose
and distinguish surely in a land that is generally hostile and strange.
I began to stay more and more within the shelter of my room, working at
my studies and at those activities which had already given me
recognition. I wanted to be plucky about it. I wanted to keep on
smiling--but there were times, I must confess, when I wished that I were
through with college and all its rough-and-tumble boyishness.
I did not care so much myself. There were all these freshmen who were
probably ten times lonelier than I was, ten times more bewildered and
disheartened by the welcome they had had. I tried to visit as many of
them as lived in dormitories. I wanted to talk things over with them, to
help them in some possible way. But it wasn't much of a success--I could
make no progress out of condonement and asking them to wait patiently
until the foolish campaign had dwindled away.
Then, one day, as I crossed the campus to a first recitation, I saw that
the brick walls of the oldest of the dormitories had been adorned with
huge painted letters:
"OUT WITH THE JEWS."
I went into a telephone booth and called up the house of one of the
professors with whom I had become friendly. He was a kindly,
well-meaning man, and an alumnus of the college.
His telephone line was busy when I called it. I heard him talking with
some one. I was about to ring off when suddenly I heard my own name
mentioned.
The professor was an alumnus member of one of the college fraternities.
And this other man--evidently an undergraduate, though I never tried to
identify him--was asking the professor what he thought of offering me an
election to this fraternity.
And I heard the professor sigh in his patient way.
"I like him--I like him very much, mind you," I heard him say, "but--er,
er--I do think it would be disastrous--nothing short of disastrous to
elect a Jew to any of our fraternities in the present situation."
I rang off. It was something to know that I was even being considered
for membership--but it was disastrous, that was all--disastrous!
When I was out upon the campus again I saw that painters were already at
work obliterating the sign. They had whitewashed the "_Out With the_"
away, and there was nothing left upon the wall but a huge, red
"JEWS."
And thank God, I could laugh at the incident!
XVII
MANY IMPULSES
Fair play comes first--and reasoning follows it. For fair play is always
an impulse. It comes when least expected.
That is how it was at the university. The incident of the big, painted
sign was practically the last demonstration against the influx of Jewish
boys. Waters, who made capital of everything, attempted to found a
formal organization dignified by the title of the Anti-Hebrew Collegiate
League, but when, at the first meeting, he was not elected to the
presidency, abandoned the project with bitter complaints against the
ingratitude of his fellow members. A little later on, when the tide had
turned in the opposite direction, he became the head of the Helping Hand
League, and was atop the wave of contrition.
For the tide did turn. Men are always afraid to carry their propaganda
beyond the point of the ridiculous. When tomfoolery turns to foolishness
its perpetrators are only too anxious for a chance to abandon it.
It was impossible to keep the thing out of the newspapers. The day after
that sign incident, there was a lurid story to be read at each of the
city's breakfast tables and in the evening subways. New York took it up
and made it a matter of shocked debate for a day and a half. The
president of the university, in his quarterly sermon in chapel, spoke
fervently of toleration and the gentle spirit.
The reaction was almost as hysterical as the movement itself. The little
Jewish freshmen--timid, frightened little mice, who had been going about
their classroom work and scurrying home and out of reach for so many
months--suddenly found themselves lauded as martyrs, as the best of
fellows.
One evening a deputation of them were waiting for me when I came in from
supper. They had formed a Jewish fraternity, and wished me to join with
them. Appeal to a Jewish philanthropist had brought them enough money to
lease a house near the campus. They were sure that they would have
sanction and support from the rest of the college, now that the
prejudice had abated. And since they could not join any of the other
fraternities, why should they not have one of their own?
I thought it over carefully. I wanted to be fair to myself as well as to
them. That same old repugnance of being identified with a distinctly
Jewish propaganda troubled me and made me turn from them. And yet it
wasn't only that, either. For when I thought it out, I knew that,
according to my point of view, theirs was not the proper solution. Fire
can fight fire, perhaps--in proverbs, anyhow--but discrimination is not
to be overpowered by a like amount of secularity. If Jewish college men
objected to that unwritten rule of fraternities; if they contended that
fraternities should be democratic; if they wanted equal rights in those
fraternities ... how, then, were they justified in standing apart and
founding a fraternity of their own--a brotherhood which should be open
only to Jews?
That is what I thought. I may have been wrong--and the excellent records
of the Jewish fraternity chapters in various colleges and universities
do perhaps prove me wrong--but I could not bring myself to join them. I
was heartily glad the whole heated question of race and race prejudice
was abated. I asked, for myself, only that I be given something of the
fair-play that other men had. I was working hard for the college. I was
doing all that my talents enabled me to do and I was sure that, sooner
or later, there would be the reward.
This reward did come, definitely. It came at the end of May when, at
the height of the reaction against the whole year of prejudice, I was
chosen for the college senior society. It was a public election, held on
the afternoon of one of the most important baseball games. There were
crowds to watch the ceremony--students and graduates, young girls and
parents ... so that the memory of the green campus and the banks of
pretty gowns and parasols, the sunshine and the cheering will be with me
till I die. I remember that there were tears in my eyes as I was chosen
... and that there came to me, with all the cool freshness of the spring
winds, the thought that this was the end, the salvation from out of all
the year's mean, squalid troubles. Here was I, a Jew, raised above all
the other Jews who had ever entered this college ... raised among the
highest, to be a power in the land, to be the champion of all those who
had suffered, the winner through hardship and handicap, a vindicated
Dreyfus, an example to all the lower classes.... For, at twenty-one,
alas, we are our own best heroes, and none can take our place!
College closed in a blaze of glory for me. There was even a note from
Aunt Selina Haberman, wishing me well of this new honor and informing me
that "Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, when she heard it, was green with envy!" Aunt
Selina wanted to know, was I going to be a wicked boy, however, and
stay away from her all next year, too. She was sure that, now I had won
out, we could get along much more smoothly than we had.
I fear I began to think a little too highly of my position in the
community. I was now capable of going to no less a person than the dean
of the college and talking over with him, as if man to man, the
possibility of an anti-Jewish agitation, the next year, and demanding in
none too deferential tones that, should it come, the college authorities
must do their share to stamp it out.
"Really, Mr.-er-er-,--what's your name?"
I told him very slowly, but it did not mean much to him. I rather pitied
the old gentleman for not paying more attention to the undergraduate
contests and triumphs.
But he did hear me out, and gave me information which I thought worth
acting on. The large majority of the Jewish boys in the freshman class
had prepared for college at one school--a large private preparatory
school in New York City. Perhaps it would be as well, suggested the
dean, for me to go to the principal of this school and talk things over
with him.
"Do you mean, I should warn him against sending so many of his boys to
our college?" I asked.
The dean appeared dreadfully shocked. "Oh, no--dear me, no. That
wouldn't do at all. Only--well, it seems that this school caters almost
entirely to the sons of wealthy Jewish men--and that this principal is
very fond of our college ... and so he grievously sends us all the boys
that he can. You know, so many boys don't know where to go to
college--and the principal often has a chance to suggest one, don't you
see!"
The dean had a very sober face, but his eyes were twinkling. It relieved
me to know, he was not taking this principal's bad judgment too
seriously.
"So you think it would be wiser if there weren't so many Jewish boys in
next year's entering class?"
"Precise--oh, no, I shouldn't dare say that, even if I thought so.
Remember, I am in an official capacity here. But come around to my house
tonight, when I've doffed my scholastic robe and am in my shirt
sleeves--and perhaps I'll tell you, then, the name of that principal."
I did not even bother to do this. Without waiting for further advice, I
went down to this school to beard the foolish principal in his den.
It was a hard matter to work my way into his presence. He had an office
and inner office, and stenographers to guard them both. I wrote on my
card, however, that I wished to speak to him regarding affairs at my
college, and evidently piqued his curiosity to the extent of his giving
me the interview.
In that inner office I found a youngish man whose face was adorned with
a heavy black beard. He seemed strangely familiar, but I could not place
him.
"Come in," he said, looking hard at me. His restless eyes did not leave
my face all the while I was talking.
"What is it you want me to do?" he asked me when I had given him some
stumbling hint of my mission.
"I think you ought to keep Jewish boys out of my college," I told him.
"It--it isn't altogether fair, and it would only provoke a renewal of
the prejudice, if there should be as many freshmen next year as there
were this."
"You are a Jew yourself," he said accusingly.
"Yes, I am. But don't judge by me.... I have always been an exception to
all that prejudice."
"Oh, have you? I wonder why?"
I resented his tone, but went on to explain how I had entered college
long before the antagonism had broken out; had worked hard, with
Christian friends to help me, until I had won honors which assured me
immunity from any unpleasantness.
"I congratulate you," he said dryly. "You no doubt deserve these honors.
Your sort always does."
I stood up angrily and looked him square in the face. Then suddenly I
recognized him.... Pictures of my public school days came up before
me.... The class room and the big, crippled bully, Geoghen.... That
finding of the Hebrew prayer book when the teacher was out of the room,
and the hooting and mocking ... and then the teacher's return--and the
fight.
It was Mr. Levi.
He smiled when he saw that I knew him, now. "I remembered you more
readily," he said. "You have no beard to change your appearance." But it
was more than his beard: there was a complete change in him from the
dreamy, pale young man who had learned so harsh a lesson in those old
days. There was a bitter twist to his mouth. His lips were set sternly,
his eyebrows were lowered, his brow crossed by scowling lines.
"There's one thing about you that I remember," he snapped at me. "You
were a Jew--and yet you stood aside and let those little cads take the
book of God and make nasty fun of it--and never raised your hand or even
your voice to stop them. That's the sort of boy you were. And, I
suppose, you're still the same. It'd seem so, anyhow. You probably won
all your college honors through standing aside. And now you have the
audacity to ask me to do the same, lest you be made uncomfortable by the
number of other Jewish boys at your college. You want me to stand aside,
do you? Well, I wish I had a thousand Jewish boys to enter into your
college's next year's class!"
He glared at me. "If you want to know the truth, I can't get a single
boy in my school to go to your college, now. I wish I could. Because I'm
training them to fight like men. They aren't the sort who win honors by
allowing themselves to be classed as exceptions...."
As for myself, I knew that he was half wrong, half right--and that there
was nothing more for me to say. I had learned what I came to learn. So I
got up to go.
"And if there's another such demonstration, next year," he sneered, "you
and your precious honors will have to stand aside again, eh? It must
keep you very light on your feet!"
XVIII
I STAND--BUT NOT ASIDE
Thus it happened that only five Jews enrolled in the entering freshman
class. One of them, of course, was Frank Cohen.
Mr. Levi's accusations had stung deeply. My anger at them was all the
more intense because my heart admitted half their truth. Nevertheless, I
was glad to see that there could be no possible aggravation this year:
surely, with only five Jewish freshmen, the percentage would be small
and unnoticed. It was all very well, that venom of Mr. Levi's--but it
was unreasonable. I would be glad if the Jewish question would never
again be mentioned during my college course.
The opening of the senior year found Frank Cohen and me on the
Palisades, talking eagerly of what his college course would mean to him.
He made me smile, his dreams were so like my own had been when I, too,
was a freshman. Made me wonder, too, how much I had fulfilled those
dreams. Something accomplished, yes--and as much unfulfilled,
disregarded, left undone. Well, perhaps, in this last year, I would
have the chance again--and would not flinch.
The chance came just two days after the opening of college. It came when
Frank Cohen burst into my room about nine o'clock at night, in company
with another Jewish freshman. The other one was dogged, frightened, and,
when he was behind my closed door, began to cry noiselessly. As for
Frank, who was made of stronger stuff, he sat silent in his chair,
grasping its arms and trying to control the intensity of some revulsion
which had come over him.
They told me quickly what had happened. They were just from a meeting of
freshman candidates for the college newspaper. The meeting had been
called in order to instruct these candidates in the rules and
qualifications of the competition. All men who cared to enter the
competition had been invited. Two men had made speeches: the
editor-in-chief and the managing editor of the paper, Sayer and Braley
by name.
These had been cordial speeches, urging all men present at the meeting
to work hard in this competition. There had been speeches of
encouragement, in glowing colors--and then, at the end of it all, in
front of the fifty-odd youths who were assembled there, Braley had
closed his speech with this:
"We wish to say that any Jew who may have it in mind to enter this
competition might as well save himself the pains. We shall not even
consider the election of a Jew to the board."
Immediately a gasp, then a snicker had run through the roomful; then
necks had craned and heads turned to catch looks at Frank and the other
freshman who stood, flushed and humiliated, in their midst.
Then the meeting had broken up, and the other candidates, taking their
cue from Braley's speech, stood aside to let Frank and his companion
pass down through whispering, giggling aisles. They had tried to go
calmly, unconcernedly, as if the shock of the insult meant nothing to
them. But the other Jewish freshman had broken down, and Frank had to
put his arm around him to keep him up and straight upon his path through
the crowd's midst, out upon the campus and over to my dormitory.
I sat a little while silent after I heard them tell of it. I was as much
stunned as they--and sickened too. I had thought all that sort of thing
was done with. I had hoped it was all past, even forgotten--and here it
was, leaping up again to confront, to threaten, to jeer at us. I had
only dimly imagined the possibility of it. I had no plan, no hint of how
I should go about it.
Two years ago, if this had happened, I should not have cared one way or
the other. I should have crawled away into a corner and buried my face
to hide my fear's approach. I should have waited to see how others
acted, how others fought--and then, at best I should have fought along
in a half-hearted, half-dreading fashion. Even now, I had nothing to
fight for. I knew what Judaism was--and that it was for the God and the
people of Judaism that I should be making my little fight--but--
I turned about and saw the eyes of the two freshmen glued upon me.
Frank's especially--and they were beginning to fill with a troubled
distrust which I had never allowed to be there before. I could not fail
Frank. I would do what I could.
"All right," I said, drawing on my coat. "Go ahead home and get to bed.
I will see what I can do."
I went with them across the campus to the other freshman's room. Frank
would sleep there for the night, though he usually went back to his
parents. I think he did not have the heart tonight to face them, and
when they asked their usual breathless questions of the day's work and
play, lie to them and hide from them the galling incident. He did not
seem to feel the insult for his own sake; he was thinking, rather, of
his mother and of how she would feel, should she ever know.
"Good night," said the other freshman soberly.
"Good night," said Frank--and I felt in his voice all of the cheery
obligation of friendship. He was expecting wonders of me.
Walking on alone, across the open gloominess of deserted paths and night
winds in the shrubbery, a thousand foolish fears tramped by my side and
sang into my ears. I had hidden my empty spirit from those two boys--but
I could not hide it from myself. I wondered what sort of a fight was
ahead of me, and how long it would last, and what would be the final
result. Those two men, Sayer and Braley, were among the most influential
of the class. They were members of my senior society. They could hold me
down by sentimental ties of brotherhood, much as Trevelyan had been held
down by his fraternity mates; failing that, they could use their
popularity, their clinch upon college opinion to force me literally into
silence. They could run me out of college, if they pleased. I knew this,
did not deny it to myself as I went forward to the first skirmish.
Once I turned around and almost retreated to my rooms. But the
remembrance of the sting that was in Frank's reproachful look would not
let me do that.
So I came to the steps of the big Y. M. C. A. building. They were many,
these white stone steps, and they shone in the moonlight with a mottling
of hazardous shadows. I mounted them and went into the huge assembly
hall on the first floor. I heard the awkward, self-conscious benediction
and adjournment of the meeting--for they were all young fellows, and had
not yet learned to be entirely glib towards their meetings--and stood
aside to let them pass out. As the first of them went through the door
and out upon the campus, they burst into the giddy laughs which
moonlight conjures--and I heard them singing foolish glees--snatches of
song that were utterly pagan and gleeful, and far from the heated
stuffiness of their prayer meeting. They seemed to have found their
Kindly Light more easily in the open.
The man for whom I now waited had always been the leader of my class;
this year, he was the idol of the entire university. Captain of
football, a 'varsity baseball man, he had the finest, sincerest
character that I had ever known. He was not merely popular, in our
undergraduate sense. Underclassmen worshipped him from afar, and
upperclassmen, who knew him and the life that he led, loved him and
respected him with a love and respect which few men can ever win.
He and I had become friendly, lately. It was due, perhaps, to the fact
that we now belonged to the same senior society. Before, I had
worshipped from afar; now I knew him well and warmly--and, as I look
back upon my college life, I am amazed to realize how much of his
influence went into the making of it.
As he came out, I noticed how his broad shoulders filled the doorway and
blocked out its light completely. But his face was above the shadows,
and I had a sudden sense of comfort from the resolute kindliness that
shone upon it.
"Fred," I said, "I want your help on something."
As president of the Y. M. C. A. he had a room allotted him in the
building where he might sleep. I knew that he had a suite in his
fraternity house, too--but he preferred to stay here, for some reason,
in this smaller, simpler place, where he would be nearer his duties.
When he had me in the plain little den, sitting before the miniature
wood fire which he heaped with broken twigs, he sat me down and gave me
a few minutes of tactful silence. I was thinking it all out. I wanted to
tell it to him fairly, concisely, with no imprecations, and yet with no
weakening of attitude. Then I did tell it, simply, just as the two boys
had told it to me.
I saw Fred's face grow troubled. Before I was through he had begun to
walk up and down the little room with a nervousness that made his pace
almost such a jog as football players use when they come out upon the
field.
"You're right," he said when I was done. "You're so right that
everything else connected with the incident is wrong--and that's the
hardest part for me to admit. You deserve to fight this out alone--it
belongs to you. I wish I had a fight like yours to make. But if you'll
let me help you--?"
"Let you? Why, I _need_ your help!"
"Then you'll have it. I'll be glad--mighty glad to chime in with you--"
He stopped short, his tremendous frame red-lined in the fire's glow, his
cheeks above his square jaw as bright as the flames themselves.
I could not answer him sentimentally. My comfort and gratitude were too
deep, my suddenly gained encouragement too surging for the narrow outlet
of words. But after a while we began to plan. We would fight it
together--and immediately.
When I got up to go, his Bible was lying open at the beginning of the
New Testament, with a ribbon and tiny silver cross to mark the place.
When Fred saw me looking at it, he must have felt some part of the
strange, shivery misgiving which had come over me. For he took the
ribbon in his fingers, so that the cross lay gleaming in his palm.
"It is Christ's symbol," he said. "It is the sign of one who
suffered--and who was a Jew."
Then, as if he must leave me no doubt of his meaning in my mind:
"Don't worry. The cross won't stand between us. Though--" His eyes
travelled slowly to the shelf above the fireplace. "Look! There's a
symbol of _your_ religion, too."
So I looked. Gleaming brass, its seven uplifting arms gracefully curved,
stood a--Menorah!
XIX
"BATTLE ROYAL!"
I awoke the next morning to an insistent knocking at my door. I sprang
out of bed and opened it. In the hall, their dress showing signs of much
haste, stood Sayer and Braley. They did not wait my invitation, but
strode at once into the room and, throwing the rumpled covers from the
bed, plumped down upon it.
"See here," said Braley, without prelude, "what's this talk about Fred's
calling a special meeting of the senior class for tonight? Do you know
anything about it?"
I smiled my way out of a pajama top. "Really?" I exclaimed. "Well, I did
hear Fred say something about it last night."
"Oh, so you talked it over with him? Did you ask for the meeting?"
I had thrown on a bathrobe. "Yes, I did. Why?"
"That's what we want to know. Why, why?"
I looked up from tying the cord about my waist. "That's just what I'm
not going to tell. Not until the meeting."
"Well, perhaps we know."
"You probably do. You deserve to."
"What do you mean by that?" Sayer jumped up and towards me. He was doing
his best to fight, I could see--but I would not give him the chance--not
prematurely!
Braley waved a conciliatory hand. He was a large, stoop-shouldered
fellow with long, light hair and an enormous forehead. He had the most
important and sumptuous manners I have ever met.
"See here, now," he said, "you really must tell us all you know about
this thing. You really must." He was very earnest about it. They were
both uneasy, it was easy to see.
"I'll tell you nothing," I said. "You will have to wait until tonight,
and then----"
"Threatening us, are you?"
"No. I'm kind enough to warn you, that's all. I don't want you to go to
the meeting unprepared."
"Oh, so it has to do with my remarks to the freshmen candidates, has
it?"
"And mine?"
"I've given you all the warning that fair play demands," I said. "Look
to your consciences for means of defense." And, flinging a towel over my
shoulder, I darted away for my morning shower, leaving them in
possession of the room. When I came back, a few minutes later, it was
apparently empty, and I thought them gone.
I was almost dressed when I went into the clothes closet to select a tie
from the rack I had there. There was a sudden rustle and movement of the
clothes at the back of the dark little place. Two men closed in on me,
dragged me into the depths of the closet. I reached out blindly,
furiously. My fists hit only against the rows of my own clothes hanging
there. A couple of coat-hangers clattered down. I stumbled and fell over
my satchel. Then the door slammed shut. As I lay there, stunned, in the
darkness, I heard the key turning in the lock, from the outside. They
had sealed me in.
I had no doubts but they had been Sayer and Braley. Though I had never
imagined they would go as far as this--and the fools! what did they
think they could accomplish by locking me up for the day?
It was easy enough to breathe in the tiny, black square. I was in no
danger. I groped my way to the suitcase and sat down on it for a few
minutes. My head pained me terrifically. My forehead was hot. I put my
hand up to it and felt a fast-swelling bruise. My fingers grew wet with
something warm. It wasn't just perspiration.... I knew that--and that,
in the struggle, I must have hit my head against one of the hooks. Or
had one of them hit me in the dark with some sharp thing that he held in
his hands?
I stood up again unsteadily, found the door handle--yes, it was locked.
I was in my stocking feet; I could not kick through a panel. I reached
along the wall, found a hook. I flung the clothes from it, gave it both
my hands and all my strength in a sudden pull. It gave way with a
spurting of loosened plaster.
It was a large, heavy hook. It made a good ram. I crashed upon the two
upper panels with it. One of them split at length--and when I rammed the
ugly iron thing against it again, it broke into splinters and my arm
went through it. Light came through dimly--and, three minutes later, I
had knocked out the whole panel, climbed through and staggered out into
the room.
The mirror showed me a bad cut over my right eye. I staunched the flow
of blood as best I could. It was so humorous an incident--like one of
the famous adventures of Frank Merriwell!
I played it out, though. I did not go out of my room the whole day. In
the afternoon I telephoned Fred, the class president, about it. He came
over to see me--and he didn't treat it as lightly as I did. He wanted me
to have a doctor, for one thing. I promised I would see one, as soon as
the meeting was over, that night.
"You'd better," he said. "That cut is mighty close to some of the most
important nerves of the eye."
It was evening when I ventured out. Over in the big assembly hall the
meeting of the senior class had already begun. I stole across the campus
with my coat collar turned up and my hat far down to hide my face. I did
not want to be recognized until I was ready. I hung about outside the
ruddy windows of the hall, watching the crowded groups that sat within.
They were listening intently to someone on the platform that I could not
see--but I knew that it was Fred, presiding. Fred--and he was explaining
it all to them, perhaps, in that deep-voiced way of his.
Then, as I watched, I saw how the heads of all who sat within the scope
of my spying craned suddenly towards the side of the room. I knew what
that meant, too. It meant that either Sayer or Braley had risen from his
seat to make reply to the president's accusation.
Then, amazed, I heard applause and laughter. The muffled clapping of
hands went on for minutes. So they approved these things that the two
editors had done, did they? So they could laugh and clap to hear how
Sayer and Braley had crushed the spirit out of two young Jews in front
of fifty other freshmen?
I grew too angry to wait. I was not going to dawdle idly in the
background, waiting for a foolish, theatrical entrance cue--I wasn't
going to "stand aside" a moment longer!
I hurried into the building, up stairs and around corners until I was at
the very threshold of the hall. The big mass of men there, the lights,
the noise of their clapping, ten times louder from within--all of it
gave a tightening to my throat. My knees began to tremble violently.
It was Braley who was speaking. He was waving his hand with his usual
sense of the grandiloquence of his remarks. I heard, I suppose, only the
last of them--but that was enough:
"I regret, of course, that I should have had to give pain to these two
poor little kike freshmen. I regret that I have thereby offended no less
a person than the president of the class. But there is the broader way
of looking at this thing: that of the interest of the whole community.
And I believe, as every man in this room believes, that it would be ten
times better that all Jews be debarred from our college. If not that,
then certainly from all our college activities, in order that real
Anglo-Saxon fair play may prevail! If any man, including the Jew who has
instigated this protest against Sayer and myself, wishes to refute
this, let him step forward now or be forever silent."
He sat down grandly, amid huzzas.
I do not know whether he or Sayer actually meant me to be incarcerated
during all that day and night, while the meeting went forward so
famously. Probably they had had it in mind when they played the
vindictive little prank, and had been ashamed, when in better senses, to
come back and release me. Certainly Sayer, who sat close to the door,
turned pale when he saw me now.
I went slowly to the front of the room. My eyes pained me and I was
nauseated. But I had ceased to tremble and was calm with a fury that
checked all nervousness.
"The Jew who instigated this protest is here to back it up," I said
slowly. "He is here to appeal to the 'real Anglo-Saxon fair play.'"
I could feel in the air the antagonism which I must down. I knew, as
never before, how bitter and insensate was the prejudice which I must
conquer by fifteen minutes of quiet words.
What I said doesn't count: I hardly remember most of it, anyhow. Before
me, as I talked, the faces swam away into a dim and meaningless strip. I
was not talking to these raw, swankering college boys. I was talking to
something beyond--to something that was infinitely brighter and more
glorious than I had ever known before. I was talking to something beyond
all earth--to Someone....
And I was appealing, was summoning, calling Him down to my aid. I was
speaking His words, in the spirit of His ancient fighting prophets. I
was fighting His fight. The calm frenzy in my heart was of His
instillation. For years I had sought Him. For years I had shunned Him,
knowing my need of Him. For all the days of my life I had borne the
fierce justice of His words as a lonely burden--and now, now....
"And I shall fight and fight," I cried, "in the name of God--the God
that is over all of us, of whatever race, creed or color--for the things
that are fair and right and just. I shall have justice for a little East
Side Jewish freshman as you shall have it, too."
Then suddenly, as if blinded by the refulgence of what I saw, my eyes
began to water and grow dim. I stood there, tense, and did not mind the
pain that was in them. But I could speak no more.
And slowly the men rose and went out, quietly, strangely--looking back
sometimes to where I stood--not comprehending everything, I suppose, but
moved beyond all common approbation. They had been conquered.
Braley remained alone with me in the deserted hall. I looked at him
across a row of seats and began to laugh.
"You didn't even say a word to them about that rotten trick we played on
you," he said, shamefacedly, his glib manners gone.
"I didn't have to," I replied. "Besides, I forgot."
"Well--er--thanks! You could have had us expelled!"
But the pain and dizziness were beyond standing now. I tore off my hat,
so that he had a glimpse of the long, sullen cut over my eye.
"Look out!" he cried, leaping up on the platform, to hold me--for I was
falling to the floor.
I remember laughing again, long but weakly. "I didn't have to! I didn't
have to!"
And after so much light, there came the darkness.
XX
THE CANDLES ARE LIGHTED
When I rose from a hospital bed of fever and darkness, ten days later,
it was with a feeling of rebirth--as if, in the dripping delirium of
threatened blindness, the last doubts had sloughed away.
And when the bandage was taken from my eyes, and I had, for the first
time in so long a while, a short and tempered bit of sunshine that came
through the shaded windows and across the clean, white floors, it was as
if I saw things, now, as I had never seen them--face to face.
I must not return immediately to college, the doctors said. There must
be another fortnight of convalescence, with absolute rest for my eyes.
They gave me my choice as to where I wanted to go--and I chose the
settlement. I should be among friends, down there; I should have the
sunny roof-garden to loiter in--and Jewish faces everywhere about me.
It was good old Trevelyan, squinting and stuttering and strangely moved,
who called for me in his car and took me away from the hospital. He had
wanted me to go to his Adirondack lodge, instead, and resigned me into
Mr. Richards' care at the settlement as if he were consigning me
reluctantly to one of the Inferno's inner limbos.
It was then the second day of the Jewish New Year. The whole teeming
neighborhood was in holiday garb and mood. From the roof that night Mr.
Richards and I stood watching the streets and their carnival crowds,
swarming indistinctly under the lamps and about the corners.
"The little people," quoted Mr. Richards, "God and the little people...."
"They are not little when they have God," I answered.
He nodded. "I was wrong in what I said in that argument of ours. Do you
remember? I said they didn't need their religion--that it was working
more harm than good among the younger generation. I've learned, now....
There isn't a person on earth that doesn't need it--all that he can get
of it--and these little people of the East Side most of all."
From below there rose to us the clang and clatter of traffic, the
indescribable rustle of the crowd, the shriek of a demon fire engine,
many streets away. But, above it all, we heard singing, on the floor
below us, of a solemn chant in rehearsal. It was the settlement Choral
Society, singing the plaintive "Kol Nidre"--and when the parts swelled
into unison, all other sounds seemed suddenly engulfed in the rich,
melancholy texture of the harmony.
Mr. Richards smiled. "There it is, you see: the grim, sad faith of the
Jewish people. It is all they have had in all their wanderings--but it
is everything."
* * * * *
The cut across my forehead healed quickly. Resting from all tasks, my
eyes regained their strength without relapse.
I had visitors. Several of the men from college came down each day. I
had not known there were so many persons who cared. Braley was among
them, once--and he sat and twisted his hat and said nothing. Whether or
not his friendship is worth anything to me, I have made a friend of him.
Once or twice, since then, he has tried to speak of the trick which he
and Sayer attempted, but I have stopped him. There is no need of going
over _that_.
Only, a few days after I went to the hospital, there was a long and
flowery retraction published in the college newspaper, inviting all
freshmen "of whatever race or creed to enter the editorial competition,
with the assurance that the most democratic principles would prevail."
At any rate, when Frank Cohen ran in to see me, on his way home, a few
days later, I advised him to re-enter the contest. Frank, with a
freshman's capacity for hero worship, leaped to act on my advice.
"And hurry up back to college," he said, with a little catch in his
voice. "There are twenty other Jewish underclassmen who want the same
sort of counsel from you. You see--they didn't know they had a
leader--and they do need one!"
It is not part of the tale, perhaps, but I cannot help intruding the
fact that Frank was the first freshman to be elected to the editorial
board of the college paper--and that, in his senior year, he became its
managing editor.
* * * * *
My aunt came, too. I had been secretly expecting her--hoping, perhaps,
for no especial reason, that she would come.
She wept a little at the sight of my healing scar. It was a long while
since I had seen her, and it shocked me--she looked so worn. She clung
to my hand for several minutes before she would speak.
"I read about it," she sobbed. "It was in the papers--and they said the
nicest things of you.... But I didn't come sooner because--because I
didn't know whether you wanted--you wanted--"
"Yes, Aunt Selina, I am very glad to see you."
She drew a deep sigh. "It has been so long--and I am growing old. I'm
just a lonely old woman, boy. And there's no comfort in old age."
I looked at her. She had changed much, I thought. "But you had so many
friends," I remonstrated. "All those intellectual society folk!"
"I don't know--they don't seem to interest me any more. I'm growing old.
That's all--old and lonely. And they are such fools, every one of
them--almost as foolish as I am--and hypocrites, all."
Her hand went tighter about mine, and her rheumy eyes sought mine and
searched them. "You seem so happy, boy--so changed. What's the secret of
it--can't you tell me?"
I shook my head. It would be of no use, I thought.
"I want it," she begged. "The comfort of it--I did not know I should
need it when I was old--and when all else fell away."
So I reached for a book which was on a table nearby, and gave it to her.
It was an old Union Prayer Book.
She took it with the barest flicker of lashes. "It's--it's Hebrew," she
protested. "I don't know how to read it."
"There is always an English translation on the opposite page," I showed
her. "You will be able to read that. Perhaps it will help you."
"Perhaps," she said after me, her thin voice quavering.
"Read it all. You will come at any rate to a better understanding of
your fellow Jews."
Her head went down, as if in shame of some unpleasant reminiscence.
"Perhaps--I will try, anyhow--and perhaps--"
"Aunt Selina," I told her hastily, "I am coming home to live with you at
the end of this college year. We shall begin all over again."
Then her tears began afresh. "I did not dare ask it--but oh, if you
could only know how I have wanted it--and for how long! I would have
prayed for it--yes, really, prayed for it--if I had only had someone to
pray to!"
And then, as if suddenly remembering, she hugged the shabby leather book
to her breast, and smiled.
But, before she left, I opened it up to show her why I prized this
particular copy. For, on the yellowed flyleaf in old ink, was the name,
"Isidore Levi." And below it, newly written, these words:
"_To a Jew who could not stand aside._"
He had sent it to me immediately after he had learned of that last
incident at college. And he did not need to explain where I had seen
this prayer book last.
* * * * *
Yom Kippur was my last day at the settlement before returning to
college. I went with Frank Cohen and his father to the service of their
orthodox congregation. The little synagogue, just off the Bowery, had
had to be abandoned, for once, in favor of a huge bare hall that usually
served political meetings. But, large as it was, it was packed tightly;
and from the gallery, where I stole once to look on, it seemed a vast
black sea--wave upon wave of derbies and shiny top hats, with the flicker
of white prayer shawls for froth. The prayers and the chantings came up
to me almost like mystic exhalations. The great, drab, smeared walls had
the splendor of the afternoon sun upon them; the cheap chairs, the
improvised altar, the temporary gilt ark behind it--the long gray beards
of the patriarchs, the wan faces of the fasting children--everything,
children--everything, every one had been gradually drenched in the glory
that poured through the windows.
It was the setting sun upon Israel--and Israel prayed and sang in the
gold of it.
* * * * *
I went back to college the next day. Mr. Richards and I had breakfast
together, so that we might say slowly and easily the last things that
were to be said.
"I'm glad you're going to finish it out," he began. "You've proved what
I once told you; that college isn't all child's play. Some things about
it are, of course." He paused a moment, a little embarrassed. "Trevelyan
phoned me last night, after you'd gone to bed."
"Yes? About me?"
"Well, in a way. He'd just come from one of our fraternity meetings. He
wanted to tell me that, when you are back, they will probably offer you
an election."
"What? To your fraternity?"
"Yes." He paused and watched me amusedly. "It doesn't seem to thrill
you."
I smiled back at him. "No, not the way I would have in freshman year."
"Yes--that's how I thought you'd feel. You needn't be afraid of hurting
my feelings--or Trevelyan's, either--by declining. They're a little too
late, aren't they?"
"Oh, it isn't that. I don't want them to think me ungrateful, you
see--but I've passed that stage. There are so many other things for me
to care about, now." I was thinking of Frank Cohen's remark about the
number of Jewish underclassmen who wanted counsel, leadership--and, now
more than ever, I was sure of myself.
"I understand," said Mr. Richards, shaking my hand at parting. "Good
luck to you--or better still, good faith to you! A man's work and a
man's God--you've found them at last."
* * * * *
That night, in my room at college, I found on the mantle shelf the big,
brass, seven-branched candlestick which I had seen in the room of the
class president. It was Fred's gift to me.
And, thinking of those years, I lit the seven candles, one by one, and
watched them struggle feebly, desperately, until all of them were calm
and bright, their flicker ended--until the Menorah, with its uplifted
arms, and all the little space about it, shone with a radiance that was
firm and beautiful.
+-----------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Typographical errors corrected in the text: |
| |
| Page 13 friendhsip changed to friendship |
| Page 22 aint changed to ain't |
| Page 32 is changed to it |
| Page 43 stifly changed to stiffly |
| Page 53 Sidney changed to Sydney |
| Page 54 Sidney changed to Sydney |
| Page 56 Sidney changed to Sydney |
| Page 69 "be began to laugh" changed to |
| "he began to laugh" |
| Page 80 occurences changed to occurrences |
| Page 115 checks changed to cheeks |
| Page 123 guesed changed to guessed |
| Page 182 relunctantly changed to reluctantly |
| Page 188 embarrased changed to embarrassed |
+-----------------------------------------------+
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