CHAPTER V
THE next morning I awoke utterly out of sorts. That I was going to take the first train for Tannersville seemed to be a matter of course, and yet I knew that I was not going to take that train, nor any other that day. I dressed myself and went out for a walk up the road, some distance beyond the grove.
The sun was out, but it had rained all night and the sandy road was damp, solid, and smooth, like baked clay. It was half an hour before breakfast-time when I returned to my cottage across the road from the hotel.
As I was about to take a chair on the tiny porch I perceived the sunlit figure of Miss Tevkin in the distance. She wore a large sailor hat and I thought it greatly enhanced the effect of her tall figure. She was making her way over a shaky little bridge. Then, reaching the road, she turned into it. I remained standing like one transfixed. The distance gave her new fascination. Every little while she would pause to look up through something that glittered in the sunshine, apparently an opera-glass. I had never heard that opera-glasses were used for observing birds, but this was evidently what she was doing at this moment, and the proceeding quickened my sense not only of her intellectual refinement, but also of her social distinction.
Presently she turned into a byway, passed the grove, and was lost to view
I seated myself, my eye on the spot where I had seen her disappear. Somebody greeted me from the hotel lawn. I returned the salutation mechanically and went on gazing at that spot. I knew that I was making a fool of myself, but I could not help it. My will-power was gone as it might from the effect of some drug
When she reappeared at last and I saw her coming back I crossed over to the hotel veranda so as to be near her when she should arrive. I found several of the boarders there, including the lawyer, the photographer, and a jewelry merchant of my acquaintance. We all watched her coming. At one moment, as she leveled her opera-glass at a bird, the lawyer said: "Studying birds. She's a great girl for studying. She is."
"Studying nothing!" the photographer jeered. "It's simply becoming to her.
It's effective, don't you know."
The lawyer smiled sagely, as if what Mendelson said was precisely what he himself had meant to intimate
I was inclined to think that Mendelson was right, but this did not detract from the force that drew me to Miss Tevkin
When she reached the veranda the lawyer gallantly offered her a chair, but she declined it, pleasantly, and went indoors. Her high heels had left deep, dear-cut imprints in a small patch of damp, sandy ground near the veranda.
This physical trace of her person fascinated me. It was a trace of stern hostility, yet I could not keep my eye away from it. I gazed and gazed at those foot-prints of hers till I seemed to be growing stupid and dizzy. "Am I losing my head?" I said to myself. "Am I obsessed? Why, I saw her yesterday for the first time and I have scarcely spoken to her. What the devil is the matter with me?"
After breakfast we returned to the veranda. The jewelry-dealer and the lawyer bored me unmercifully. Finally I was saved from them by the arrival of the Sunday papers, but my reading was soon disturbed by the intrusions of a mother and her marriageable daughter. There was no escape. I had to lay down my paper and let them torture me. There was a striking family resemblance between the two, yet the daughter was as homely as the mother was pretty. "She isn't as prepossessing as her ma, of course," the older woman seemed to be saying to me, "but she's charming, all the same, isn't she?"
Miss Lazar was watching me at a respectful distance. Mrs. Kalch was deep in a game of pinochle in a small ground-floor room that gave out on the veranda. The window was open and I could hear Mrs. Kalch's voice. She seemed to have been losing. The little room, by the way, was used both as a synagogue and a gambling-room. In the mornings, before breakfast, it was filled with old men in praying-shawls and phylacteries, while the rest of the day, until late at night, it was in the possession of card-players
I wanted to wire Bender to send a message to Fanny, in my name, stating that I had been unavoidably detained in the city, but I lacked the energy to do so. I had not even the energy to extricate myself from the attentions of the pretty mother of the homely girl
That charity meeting bothered me more than anything else. One was apt to impute my absence to meanness. I pictured Kaplan's disappointment, and I felt like going to Tannersville for his sake, if for no other reason. The next best thing would have been to have Bender wire my contribution to each of the two funds. But I did not stir
The hotel-keeper came out to remind me of my train
"Thank you," I said, with a smile. "But the weather is too confoundedly good. I'm too lazy to leave your place, Rivesman. You must have ordered this weather on purpose to detain me."
I was hoping, of course, that my presence in this hotel would be unknown to the Kaplans, for some time at least. Soon, however, something happened which made it inevitable that they should hear of it that very evening
On Sundays the Jewish summer hotels are usually visited by committees of various philanthropic institutions who go from place to place making speeches and collecting donations. One such committee appeared in the dining-room of the Rigi Kulm at the dinner-hour, which on Sundays was between 1 and 3. It represented a day nursery, an establishment where the children of the East Side poor are taken care of while their mothers are at work, and it consisted of two men, one of whom was an eloquent young rabbi.
As the ecclesiastic took his stand near the piano and began his appeal my heart sank within me. I had once met him at Kaplan's house, where he was a frequent visitor, and had given him a check. It goes without saying that I had to give him a contribution now and to talk to him. At this I learned, to my consternation, that he was going to Tannersville that very afternoon
"Shall I convey your regards?" he asked
"Very kind of you," I answered, and I added in an undertone, out of
Mrs.
Kalch's hearing, "Please tell Mr. Kaplan I'm here on an important matter and that I have been detained longer than I expected."
When he had gone over to the next table I said to myself: "I don't care.
Come what may."
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 play of color and light in the sky was a revelation to me. The edge of the sun, a vivid red, was peeping out of a gray patch of cloud that looked like a sack, the sack hanging with its mouth downward and the red disk slowly emerging from it. Spread directly underneath was a pool of molten gold into which the sun was seemingly about to drop. As the disk continued to glide out of the bag it gradually grew into a huge fiery ball of magnificent crimson, suffusing the valley with divine light. At the moment when it was just going to plunge into the golden pool the pool vanished. The crimson ball kept sinking until it was buried in a region of darkness. When the last fiery speck of it disappeared the sky broke into an evensong of color so solemn, so pensive that my wretched mood interpreted it as a visible dirge for the dead sun. Rose lapsed into purple, purple merged into blue, the blue bordering on a field of hammered gold that was changing shape and hue; all of which was eloquent of sadness. It seemed as though the heavens were in an ecstasy of grief and everybody about me were about to break into tears
some of the old women gasped. "How nice!" "Isn't it lovely?" said several girls
"Isn't that glorious?" said Miss Tevkin. "It's one of the most exquisite sunsets I have seen in a long time." And she referred to certain "effects," apparently in the work of a well-known landscape painter, which I did not understand
I discovered a note of consciousness in her rapture, something like a patronizing approval of the sky by one who looked at it with a professional eye. Nevertheless, I felt that my poor soul was cringing before her
An epigram occurred to me, something about the discrepancy between the spiritual quality of the sunset and the after-supper satisfaction of the onlookers. I essayed to express it, but was so embarrassed that I made a muddle of my English. Miss Tevkin took no notice of the remark.
The sunset was transformed into a thousand lumps of pearl, here and there edged with flame. In some places the pearl thinned away, dissolving into the color of the sky, while the outline of the lump remained—a map of glowing tracery on a ground of the subtlest blue. Drifts of gold were gleaming, blazing, going out. A vast heap of silver caught fire. The outlined map disappeared, its place being taken by a raised one, with continents, islands, mountains, and seas of ravishing azure
What was the power behind this sublime spectacle? Where did it come from? What did it all mean? I visioned a chorus of angels. My heart was full of God, full of that stately girl, full of misery.
"If I only got a chance to have a decent talk with her!" I said to myself again and again.