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In the evening, as the crowd swarmed out of the dining-room, it was greeted by a gorgeous sunset. Everybody appreciated its beauty, but Miss Tevkin and Miss Siegel went into ecstasies over it, with something of the specialist in their exclamations. As for me, it was the first rich sunset I had seen since I crossed the ocean, and then I had scarcely known what it was.
The thought of Tevkin reading these reports and of Anna hearing of them hurt me cruelly. I could see Moissey reveling in the hisses with which my name was greeted. And Elsie? Did she take part in some of the demonstrations against me? Were she and Anna collecting funds for my striking employees? The reports in the American papers also were inclined to favor the strikers.
She told me, for example, of some sensational discoveries made by several boarders regarding a certain mother of five children, of her sister who was "not a bit better," and of a couple who were supposed to be man and wife, but who seemed to be "somebody else's man and somebody else's wife." At last Miss Tevkin and Miss Siegel entered the dining-room. Something like a thrill passed through me.
At first I thought they were grasshoppers, but they were gray and had wings. I followed them with genuine interest, yet all the time I kept working on the speech that I was going to deliver to Miss Tevkin I was lingering at a spot a few yards from the grove on the opposite side of the main road when suddenly twilight fell over half of the valley. I raised my eyes.
The real-estate man uttered a chuckle "Would you turn the theater into a church or a reform synagogue?" the photographer continued. "People go to see a play because they want to enjoy themselves, not because they feel that their morals need darning." "But in good literature the moral is not preached as a sermon," Miss Tevkin replied. "It naturally follows from the life it presents.
The figures of the beautiful girl and of the enamoured young poet, as I pictured them, were vivid in my mind. "Did he write of his love in those letters?" I demanded, shyly "He did not write of onions, did he?" Naphtali retorted. After a little I asked: "But how could she read those letters? She certainly does not read holy tongue?" "Go ask her." "You're a funny fellow. Did Tevkin get the girl?"
"It simply means that at the bottom of our hearts we Jews are a sad people," Miss Tevkin interceded. "There is a broad streak of tragedy in our psychology. It's the result of many centuries of persecution and homelessness. Gentiles take life more easily than we do. My father has a beautiful poem on the theme. But then the Russians are even more melancholy than we are.
Tevkin had an interest in some of these operations, and, as they were mostly concerned with property in Harlem or in the Bronx, his house became my real-estate headquarters. There were two classes of callers at his home now: the socialists and the literary men or artists who visited Tevkin's children and the "real-estate crowd" who came to see Tevkin himself.
He shook hands with one of the men I had seen on the former occasion and seated himself by his side "Either a journalist in search of material," Tevkin explained to me in answer to a question, "or simply a man of literary tastes who is drawn to the atmosphere of this place." The café rose in my estimation
She flooded my soul with ecstasy Tevkin's religion was Judaism, Zionism. Mine was Anna. The second half of the story is usually read with less pomp and circumstance than the first, many a passage in it being often skipped altogether. So Tevkin dismissed us all, remaining alone at the table to chant the three final ballads, which he had characterized to his children as "charming bits of folk-lore."
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