“Once I am treating, both ladas must be treated alike, ain’ it?” remarked the gallant, and again he proved himself as good as his word, although Fanny struggled with greater energy and ostensibly with more real indignation.
“But vy don’t you treat, you stingy loafer you?”
“Vot elsh you vant? A peench?” He was again on the point of suiting the action to the word, but Mamie contrived to repay the pinch before she had received it, and added a generous piece of profanity into the bargain. Whereupon there ensued a scuffle of a character which defies description in more senses than one.
Nevertheless Jake marched his two “ladas” up to the marble fountain, and regaled them with two cents’ worth of soda each.
An hour or so later, when Jake got out into the street, his breast pocket was loaded with a fresh batch of “Professor Peltner’s Grand Annual Ball” tickets, and his two arms—with Mamie and Fanny respectively.
“As soon as I get my wages I’ll call on the installment agent and give him a deposit for a steamship ticket,” presently glimmered through his mind, as he adjusted his hold upon the two girls, snugly gathering them to his sides.
CHAPTER III.
IN THE GRIP OF HIS PAST.
Jake had never even vaguely abandoned the idea of supplying his wife and child with the means of coming to join him. He was more or less prompt in remitting her monthly allowance of ten rubles, and the visit to the draft and passage office had become part of the routine of his life. It had the invariable effect of arousing his dormant scruples, and he hardly ever left the office without ascertaining the price of a steerage voyage from Hamburg to New York. But no sooner did he emerge from the dingy basement into the noisy scenes of Essex Street, than he would consciously let his mind wander off to other topics.
Formerly, during the early part of his sojourn in Boston, his landing place, where some of his townsfolk resided and where he had passed his first two years in America, he used to mention his Gitl and his Yosselé so frequently and so enthusiastically, that some wags among the Hanover Street tailors would sing “Yekl and wife and the baby” to the tune of Molly and I and the Baby. In the natural course of things, however, these retrospective effusions gradually became far between, and since he had shifted his abode to New York he carefully avoided all reference to his antecedents. The Jewish quarter of the metropolis, which is a vast and compact city within a city, offers its denizens incomparably fewer chances of contact with the English-speaking portion of the population than any of the three separate Ghettos of Boston. As a consequence, since Jake’s advent to New York his passion for American sport had considerably cooled off. And, to make up for this, his enthusiastic nature before long found vent in dancing and in a general life of gallantry. His proved knack with the gentle sex had turned his head and now cost him all his leisure time. Still, he would occasionally attend some variety show in which boxing was the main drawing card, and somehow managed to keep track of the salient events of the sporting world generally. Judging from his unstaid habits and happy-go-lucky abandon to the pleasures of life, his present associates took it for granted that he was single, and instead of twitting him with the feigned assumption that he had deserted a family—a piece of burlesque as old as the Ghetto—they would quiz him as to which of his girls he was “dead struck” on, and as to the day fixed for the wedding. On more than one such occasion he had on the tip of his tongue the seemingly jocular question, “How do you know I am not married already?” But he never let the sentence cross his lips, and would, instead, observe facetiously that he was not “shtruck on nu goil,” and that he was dead struck on all of them in “whulshale.” “I hate retail beesnesh, shee? Dot’sh a’ kin’ a man I am!” One day, in the course of an intimate conversation with Joe, Jake, dropping into a philosophical mood, remarked:
“It’s something like a baker, ain’t it? The more cakes he has the less he likes them. You and I have a lot of girls; that’s why we don’t care for any one of them.”