CHAPTER VI
HUNTINGTON was a rising man and the other cloak-buyers were watchng him.
When it became known that there was a young manufacturer named Levinsky with whom he was placing heavy orders I began to attract general attention. My reputation for selling "first-rate stuff" for the lowest prices quoted spread. Buyers would call at my rookery of a shop before I had time to seek an interview with them. The appearance of my place and the crudity of my office facilities, so far from militating against my progress, helped to accelerate it. Skeptical buyers who had doubted my ability to undersell the old-established houses became convinced of it when they inspected my primitive-looking establishment.
The place became far too small for me. I moved to much larger quarters, consisting of the two uppermost floors and garret of a double tenement-house of the old type. A hall bedroom was converted into an office, the first separate room I ever had for the purpose, and I enjoyed the possession of it as much as I had done my first check-book. I had a lounge put in it, and often, at the height of the manufacturing season, when I worked from daybreak far into the night and lived on sandwiches, I would, instead of going home for the night, snatch three or four hours' sleep on it. The only thing that annoyed me was a faint odor of mold which filled my bedroom-office and which kept me in mind of the Margolises' old apartment.
There was the pain of my second love-affair in that odor, for, although I had not seen Dora nor heard of her for more than two years, I still thought of her often, and when I did her image still gave me pangs of yearning.
There was an air of prosperity and growth about my new place, but this did not interfere with the old air of skimpiness and cheapness as to running expenses and other elements that go to make up the cost of production
Bender's salary had been raised substantially, so much so that he had resigned his place as evening-school teacher, devoting himself exclusively to my shop and office. He was provokingly childish as ever, but he had learned a vast deal about the cloak business, its mechanical branch as well as the commercial end of it, and his usefulness had grown enormously
One morning I was hustling about my garret floor, vibrating with energy and self-importance, when he came up the stairs, saying: "There is a woman on the main floor who wants to see you. She says you know her." Was it Dora? I descended the stairs in a flutter
I was mistaken. It was Mrs. Chaikin. She looked haggard and more than usually frowsy. The cause of her pitiable appearance was no riddle to me. I knew that her husband's partner had made a mess of their business and that Chaikin had lost all his savings. "Does she want a loan?" I speculated
My first impulse was to take her to my little office, but I instantly realized that it would not be wise to flaunt such a mark of my advancement before her. I offered her a chair in a corner of the room in which I found her
"How is Chaikin? How is Maxie?"
"Thank God, Maxie is quite a boy," she answered, coyly. "Why don't you come to see him? Have you forgotten him? He has not forgotten you. Always asking about 'Uncle Levinsky.' Some little children have a better memory than some grown people."
Having delivered this thrust, she swept my shop with a sepulchral glance, followed by a succession of nods. Then she said, with a grin at once wheedling and malicious: "There are two more floors, aren't there? And I see you're very busy, thank God. Plenty of orders, hey? Thank God. Well, when Chaikin gets something started and there is nobody to spoil it, it's sure to go well. Isn't it?"
"Chaikin is certainly a fine designer," I replied, noncommittally, wondering what she was driving at
"A fine designer! Is that all?" she protested, with exquisite sarcasm. "And who fixed up this whole business? styles got the business started and gave it the name it has? Only 'a fine designer,' indeed! It's a good thing you admit that much at least. Well, but what's the use quarreling? I am here as a friend, not to make threats. That's not in my nature."
She gave me a propitiating look, and paused for my reply. "What do you mean, Mrs. Chaikin?" I asked, with an air of complaisant perplexity
"'What do you mean?'" she mocked me, suavely. "Poor fellow, he doesn't understand what a person means. He has no head on his shoulders, the poor thing. But what's the good beating about the bush, Levinsky? I am here to tell you that we have decided to come back and be partners again."
I did not burst into laughter. I just looked her over, and said, in the calmest and most business-like manner: "That's impossible, Mrs. Chaikin. The business doesn't need any partner."
"Doesn't need any partner! But it's ours, this business, as much as yours; even more. It is our sweat and our blood. Why, you hadn't a cent to your name when we started it, and you know it. And what did you have, pray? Did you know anything about cloaks? Could you do anything without Chaikin?"
"We won't argue about it, Mrs. Chaikin."
"Not argue about it?"
She was working herself into a rage, but she nipped it in the bud. "Now, look here, Levinsky," she said, with fresh suavity. "I have told you I haven't come here to pick a quarrel. Maxie misses you very much. He's always speaking about you." She tried a tone of persuasion. "When Chaikin and you are together again the business will go like grease. You know it will. He'll be the inside man and you'll attend to the outside business. You won't have to worry about anything around the shop, and, well, I needn't tell you what his designs will do for the business. Why, the Manheimers are just begging him to become their partner" (this was a lie, of course), "but I say: 'No, Chaikin! Better let us stick to our own business, even if it is much smaller, and let's be satisfied with whatever God is pleased to give us.'" Her protestations and pleadings proving ineffectual, she burst into another fury and made an ugly scene, threatening to retain "the biggest lawyer in the 'Nited States" and to commence action against me
I smiled
"Look at him! He's smiling!" she said, addressing herself to some of my men.
"He thinks he can swindle people and be left alone."
"Better go home, Mrs. Chaikin," I said, impatiently. "I have no time." "All right. We shall see!" she snapped, flouncing out. Before she closed the door on herself she returned and, stalking up to the chair which she had occupied a minute before, she seated herself again, defiantly. "Chase me out, if you dare," she said, with a sneer, her chin in the air. "I should just like to see you do it. Should like to see you chase me out of my own shop. It's all mine! all mine!" she shouted, her voice mounting hysterically. "All mine! Chaikin's sweat and blood. You're a swindler, a thief! I'll put you in Sing Sing."
She went off into a swoon, more or less affected, and when I had brought her to herself she shed a flood of quiet tears
"Take pity, oh, do take pity!" she besought, patting my hand. "You have a Jewish heart; you'll take pity."
There was nothing for it but to edge out of the room and to hide myself
A week later she came again, this time with Maxie, whom I had not seen for nearly three years and who seemed to have grown to double his former size.
On this occasion she threatened to denounce me to the Cloak-makers' Union for employing scab labor. Finally she made a scene that caused me to whisper to Bender to telephone for a policeman. Before complying, however, he tried persuasion.
"You had better go, madam," he said to her, meekly. "You are excited."
Partly because he was a stranger to her, but mainly, I think, because of his American appearance and English, she obeyed him at once.
The next day her husband came. He looked so worn and wretched and he was so ill at ease as he attempted to explain his errand that I could scarcely make out his words, but I received him well and my manner was encouraging, so he soon found his tongue
"Don't you care to have it in the old way again?" he said, piteously
"Why, I wish I could, Mr. Chaikin. I should be very glad to have you here. I mean what I say. But it's really impossible."
"I should try my best, you know." "I know you would."
After a pause he said: "She'll drive me into the grave. She makes my life so miserable."
"But it was she who made you get out of our partnership," I remarked, sympathetically
"Yes, and now she blames it all on me. When she heard you had moved to a larger place she fainted. Couldn't you take me back?"
He finally went to work as a designer for one of the old firms, at a smaller salary than his former employers had paid him
For the present I continued to worry along with my free-lance designer, but as a matter of fact Chaikin's wonderful feeling for line and color was, unbeknown to himself, in my service. The practice of pirating designs was rapidly becoming an open secret, in fact. Styles put out by the big houses were copied by some of their tailors, who would sell the drawing for a few dollars to some of the smaller houses in plenty of time before the new cloak or suit had been placed on the market. In this manner it was that I obtained, almost regularly, copies of Chaikin's latest designs
The period of dire distress that smote the country about this time—the memorable crisis of 1893—dealt me a staggering blow, but I soon recovered from it. The crisis had been preceded by a series of bitter conflicts between the old manufacturers and the Cloak-makers' Union, in the form of lockouts, strikes, and criminal proceedings against the leaders of the union, which had proved fatal to both. The union was still in existence, but it was a mere shadow of the formidable body that it had been three years before. And, as work was scarce, labor could be had for a song, as the phrase goes. This enabled me to make a number of comparatively large sales.
To tell the truth, the decay of the union was a source of regret to me, as the special talents I had developed for dodging it while it was powerful had formerly given me an advantage over a majority of my competitors which I now did not enjoy. Everybody was now practically free from its control.
Everybody could have all the cheap labor he wanted.
Still, I was one of a minority of cloak-manufacturers who contrived to bring down the cost of production to an extraordinarily low level, and so I gradually obtained considerable business, rallying from the shock of the panic before it was well over.