Collected Stories Page 5

  Of a sudden it occured to his distracted mind that he might still save himself by surrendering the bag to its owner. Without another thought he hastened out of the alley and around the corner. He followed the walk until he came before a handsome residence of gray stone which he identified as the one in whose ash-pit he had found the bag. Almost breathless with fear and awe, he scurried up its walk and steps to the grilled outer doors. He found the bell and gave it a brief ring. In a few moments the doors were opened up on a brightly lighted vestibule and he beheld hazily a young woman clad in an austerely cut uniform of black and white.

  Barely raising his eyes to her face he lifted the bag, humbly as a priest would lift an offering to the altar of some wrathful god, and mumbled,

  “I found this in the trash.”

  Looking at the bag, the maid recognized it as one belonging to her employer. She realized that it must have been thrown in the trash-pit with the milliner’s box which she had removed from her employer’s room that morning. She feared, however, that she might be dismissed for carelessness should she tell the true circumstances of its loss and recovery. Therefore, upon bringing the bag to her employer’s bedroom, where she was dressing for a dinner engagement, she said.

  “Mrs. Ferrabye, I found this lying on the piano.”

  Without turning from her dressing table at which she was arranging her hair, the woman replied,

  “Put it in my drawer, Hilda.”

  A few minutes later a delivery man arrived with a belated package from a modiste’s shop. The maid carried it up to her employer’s room, laid it on the bed and gave her employer the bill. It amounted to several hundred dollars. The woman opened her beaded bag. She drew out that sum—practically all that the bag contained—and handed it to the maid. Then she lifted the lid of the box and raised from its tissue wrappings an evening wrap of diaphanous white material, sprinkled with glistening bits of metal. She held it beneath the light to survey it critically a moment; then dropped it upon the bed, marring the refined beauty of her face with a grimace of disgust.

  “Honestly, I must have been out of my mind when I bought this thing. Why I could never dream of wearing anything so perfectly ridiculous.”

  Turning back to the mirror and beginning once more to smooth the golden coils of her hair, her momentary annoyance passed, and her face quickly resumed its former expression of smiling self-satisfaction.

  (Published 1930)

  Something by Tolstoi

  I was dead tired and I felt myself a failure; the place looked like a quiet hole, in which a person could hide from a world which seemed all against him; and, finally, Brodzky wanted his son to go to college; there you have the reasons for my becoming a clerk in the bookshop. The morning I got the job I had been dazedly walking the streets for several hours. In the shop window that neatly printed sign, CLERK WANTED, caught my attention. I walked in and found the proprietor, a gaunt, Hebraic figure of a man, in the back of the shop, seated behind a huge desk piled with books. He looked me over shrewdly. What induced him to hire me is difficult to imagine. My face drawn and my body sagging with sleeplessness, I could hardly have been of a very prepossessing appearance. Perhaps something about me communicated to him the fact that I would work earnestly and faithfully in return for just the quiet and dusky security that his small bookshop had to offer.

  At any rate, I got the job and found it very much what I had wanted. My life was dull, but its dullness was compensated, if compensation were needed, by the privilege of being witness to a drama that was no less rich, I am sure, than any contained in those thousands of volumes which crammed the bookshop’s dusty shelves.

  At that time, Brodzky’s son was eighteen. He was the spiritual, contemplative type of young Russian Jew, with slender build, dark skin, delicate, aesthetic features. I never got to know him. No one could, for he was as reticent as a small wild animal—the sort of person it is utterly impossible to come within any companionable distance of. This story is about him—his father died two months after employing me.

  Young Brodzky was terribly in love and the girl was a gentile. That was why old Mr. Brodzky wanted to get him off to college. Like most other Jews of his generation, he desperately opposed the marriage of his son with a gentile, and it looked as though the two, if, left alone, would inevitably drift into marriage. The boy was with her all the time. He was never with anyone else. They had grown up together; played all their childhood upon the same back fire escape; grown into each other, you might say.

  They weren’t at all alike. There was, of course, the ordinary racial difference—the difference of Gallic blood from Hebrew blood, which is almost like the difference of the sun from the moon. But there was more than that. There was a complete antithesis of temperaments. He was, as I have said, timid and spiritual and contemplative; she was something of a hoyden—full of animal spirits, life, and enthusiasm.

  In spite of that, they had loved each other tremendously since childhood. He had been lonely, I guess, and she had been uncared for.

  When I first saw her, she was a lovely-looking girl. Her body seemed a perfect expression of her spirit. It emanated brightness and warmth. But the loveliest thing about her was her voice. Often, in the evenings, she sang to him, and with such compelling charm that I could never help listening, whatever my occupation or thoughts.

  Shortly after I had replaced young Brodzky as his father’s clerk and the boy had been sent off to college, the old man fell ill. Mrs. Brodzky sent very quickly for her son, but before he had time to return, the branched candles were lighted, and the death chants were being sung in the family rooms above the shop. Mrs. Brodzky’s will was not as strong as her husband’s had been. The boy refused to go back to college, and in less than a month he and the girl were married and were living together in the upstairs rooms. Then began the tragic drama to which, for fifteen years, I was a spectator.

  The conflict between their temperaments was immediately as obvious as their devotion to each other had been.

  She had never had anything. It was probable that during her childhood she had often been in want of adequate food and clothing. She should have been satisfied enough, one would think, with her position as the wife of the owner of a fairly prosperous bookshop. But she was an inordinately energetic and ambitious little thing. She wanted more, much more, than the modest bookshop could give. She began urging her husband to sell it and get into some more lucrative business. She couldn’t see how impossible that would be. Long as she had known him, she couldn’t see that such a dreamy fellow as he could fit nowhere better than in a bookshop. He saw it plainly enough, however. Change was something that he dreaded. He loved the dusky security of that little shop—loved it as passionately as I had loved it. That was why, although we were not companionable, we had come to feel for each other a strong sympathy. We had the same abhorrence of those noisy streets that lay outside the bookshop door.

  She kept after him relentlessly; gave him no peace; concentrated all of her immense energy in the struggle with him. But the boy found in his race heritage the strength to stand against her. And this is what happened after nearly a year. She met a vaudeville agent somehow. He discovered the loveliness of her voice and told her the possibilities it might have in the theatrical business. Told her a lot of things, I suppose, and at last bewitched her so completely with expectations that she determined to leave her husband.

  I don’t suppose I have made clear enough the way that the young fellow loved his wife. It was more than the usual uxoriousness of the Jew. His love for her was the core of his life. There is a great danger to such a love. When the loved one is lost, the life is lost. It crumbles to pieces. That is what happened to the life of young Brodzky when his wife went away with the vaudeville company.

  I should describe to you the way she left him.

  One morning, after having talked, I suppose, with the vaudeville agent she dashed into the shop and called to her husband, who was unpacking a new shipment of books. She had a wild, h
ysterical note in her voice, and she held one hand against her throat as though somebody had been choking her.

  From the way that she spoke to him you would have thought they had been engaged in a violent quarrel. But it had come out of a clear sky—a sky, at least, that was no more than ordinarily clouded.

  She said to him: “I have come to the end of my rope. I can’t stand it here any longer. I’ve told you time and again, but it’s no use. I’ve got a wonderful chance now—and I’m going to take it. I’m going to Europe with a vaudeville show.”

  The boy said nothing to her at first; he looked as though he had had all the life knocked out of him. He stared uncomprehendingly after her as she rushed up the stairs to their living rooms. Oddly, I recall that he was holding in his hands a red-bound book of which we sold several hundred copies that season, flippantly titled. Idiots in Love, and that, despite the real tragedy of the situation, I could hardly prevent a smile at the grotesque pertinence of that title to the dazed, helpless look on his face.

  When she came down again he seemed to have come, at last, to understand what was happening.

  “You are going away?” he asked dully.

  She replied that she was. Then he reached in his pocket and handed her a heavy black key. It was the key to the front door of the shop.

  “You had better keep this,” he told her, still with complete quietness, “because you will want it some day. Your love is not so much less than mine that you can get away from it. You will come back sometime, and I will be waiting.”

  She clutched him by the shoulders, kissed him, and then, gasping sharply, ran out of the shop. From the dusky interior, we stood looking after her. Together, we stood looking into the street that we both abhorred and feared; the street, noisy with life and brilliant with sunlight, which seemed to exult maliciously in having swept into its busy stream all that was of any value to the man beside me.

  During the months and the years that followed I was witness to a thing which seemed to me worse than death.

  As I said, she had been the core of his life. When she was gone, he went to pieces. I thought at first that he would fall into a complete and violent madness. Distractedly he walked the crooked aisles among the bookshelves, moaning and rubbing his hands up and down the sides of his coat. Customers stared at him and hastened out of the shop. I tried to persuade him to remain upstairs. But he wouldn’t. He could not stand it up there, I suppose; their living rooms were haunted by the memory of her. For several nights he stayed vwth me in the room which I occupied in the rear of the shop. He didn’t sleep. He kept me awake with a constant muttering—words that were addressed to her. More than anything else, he would say, “You love me—sometime you are going to come back.”

  Seeing that he was not getting over it, I sent for his mother, who had gone to live with some relatives. She quieted him a little. And not long after that he took to reading.

  He took to reading as another man might have taken to drink or to drugs. He read to escape from reality. And in the end his reading accomplished its purpose with a dreadful effectiveness.

  Seated at the great desk near the back of the shop, he would read the whole of the day, until his eyes closed with weariness. His mother and I tried to rouse him, to get him to wait upon customers, unpack and arrange books, not because his help was needed but because we felt that he might be benefited by the occupation. He seemed willing to do what he could. But he had become as helpless and awkward as a baby. His constant reading fogged his consciousness, made him increasingly dull. The simplest questions put to him by customers puzzled him. He could not remember the titles of the books they asked for. He stared around him in a ridiculous, bewildered way, as though he had just come out of a deep sleep.

  I had hoped-for I had come to feel for him a strong pity and sympathy—that this state would be only temporary. As months and years went by, however, it showed no sign of passing. He was apparently a lost man—a burnt-out candle. There was no hope for ever reviving him. Not unless she should return to him. And even in that case—even if she did come back—perhaps it would be too late.

  Nearly fifteen years after she had left, to go abroad with the vaudeville company, the young Mrs. Brodzky returned to the bookshop. It was a mid-December evening; dark had fallen, but the people, shopping for Christmas, were still swarming upon the city walks. Their breath covered the window of the shop, I remember, with a glistening frost.

  The shop was closed and all the lights extinguished except the bulb suspended over the desk in the rear, where Brodzky was reading. I was standing at the door, interested in the pageant of the passing people. A handsome chauffeured car drew up to the curb and a woman, wrapped in furs, emerged from its tonneau. A street lamp stood directly above the car, so that when the woman turned her head toward the shop, I knew instantly that it was she.

  With an odd, feeling of terror, I shrank away from the door, half hiding myself among the shadowy bookshelves. She approached the door, making her way eagerly through the swarm of shoppers. Apparently she was unchanged; in her face and the movements of her body, sharply illuminated by the street lamp, she was as intensely alive as before. Why had she come back, I wondered? Had her husband’s prophecy been fulfilled and had she found, after fifteen years, that her love for him had been too strong to escape?

  I was about to force myself, with an extreme reluctance, to step to the door and admit her, when a key sounded against the lock. She still had it—the key that he had given her that morning fifteen years before!

  In a moment the door had swung open and she was standing within the dim-lit shop. I could hear her breath, coming sharply. She looked about her with glistening eyes, but somehow failed to see me as I crouched foolishly in a corner among the bookshelves. I could see that she was tremendously excited. She was clutching her throat with one gloved hand, just as she had done the morning that she left—as though somebody had been choking her.

  In the fifteen years since she had left it, the place had changed little: so little, indeed, that it must have been extremely difficult for her to believe that those years had actually passed. They must suddenly have seemed altogether incredible, like a fantastic dream. The dimness, the queer shadows of the piled tables and shelves, the smell of the paper, the muted sound of the crowded street—it must have been overwhelmingly like those winter evenings, fifteen years before, when she had used to come down from their living rooms above to help him close shop.

  She must have had the feeling of one stepping back, literally, into the past.

  Pressing a tiny handkerchief against her lips, she seemed to be struggling to contain herself. Softly, she stepped forward. She must have seen, then, that he was seated at the desk. Only the top of his head was visible; the rest was concealed by a large book. His hair, thick and blue-black and uncombed, glistened brightly beneath the electric bulb. It occurred to me, with quickening horror, that she would find him physically almost unchanged. In those fifteen years he had not very perceptibly aged; he was too lifeless, it had seemed, to grow any older.

  I told myself that I must step forward and prepare her for what she must discover. But something prevented me altogether from stirring from my hiding place among the bookshelves. I watched her as she slowly advanced to the desk and I seemed to feel the intensity of her emotion. It seemed to bore through me—unendurably.

  I often wonder what she was thinking as she stood before the desk, looking down at the man whom she had loved passionately as her husband fifteen years before. She might well have been puzzled, by then, at the strange absorption with which he read, his consciousness apparently unpenetrated by the sound of her entrance and her footsteps, creaking noisily upon the ancient boards of the floor. Perhaps, however, she was too nearly filled with joy, and a kind of terror, to wonder about anything.

  In a sharp, trembling voice she called his name: “Jacob.”

  With a jerk, he raised his head and stared in her direction with blinking, squinting eyes. Moments dragged by, ex
cruciatingly slow, while I watched them staring at each other.

  I had expected her to cry out and fling herself upon him; that, assuredly, would have been the natural thing for her to do. But the dullness, the total unrecognition in his eyes must have restrained her. What could she have been thinking? Did she suppose that he was deliberately refusing to recognize her? Or did she imagine that the fifteen years had altered her beyond his knowing her?

  When I thought that the very air must snap with tenseness, he spoke.

  He spoke to her, in that hollow, quavering voice that had become habitual to him, these words: “Do you want a book?”

  She raised her gloved hand to her throat and uttered a slight gasp. I was glad that her back was toward me and that I couldn’t see her face. The wracking moments dragged on, while those two continued to stare at each other. She must have come, at last, to some conclusion; she must have determined that the fifteen years had done so much more to her than to him that she was unrecognizable. At any rate, she seemed to gain possession of herself. Her figure relaxed somewhat and she lowered her hand from her throat.

  “Do you want a book?” he repeated.

  She stammered: “No—that is—I wanted a book, but I’ve forgotten the name of it.”

  Before those staring eyes she must have found it utterly impossible to say abruptly, “I am Lila. I have come back to you.” She must have seized this pretense of having come for a book as a means of disclosing herself to him with a less awkward directness.