Jake, writhing under her lashes, protested his freedom as emphatically as he could; but it only served to whet Mamie’s spite, and against her will she went on twitting him as a henpecked husband and an old-fashioned Jew. Finally she reverted to the subject of his debt, whereupon he took fire, and after an interchange of threats and some quite forcible language they parted company.
From that evening the spectre of Mamie dressed in her white blouse almost unremittingly preyed on Jake’s mind. The mournful sneer which had lit her pale, invalid-looking face on their last interview, when she wore that blouse, relentlessly stared down into his heart; gnawed at it with tantalizing deliberation; “drew out his soul,” as he once put it to himself, dropping his arms and head in despair. “Is this what they call love?” he wondered, thinking of the strange, hitherto unexperienced kind of malady, which seemed to be gradually consuming his whole being. He felt as if Mamie had breathed a delicious poison into his veins, which was now taking effect, spreading a devouring fire through his soul, and kindling him with a frantic thirst for more of the same virus. His features became distended, as it were, and acquired a feverish effect; his eyes had a pitiable, beseeching look, like those of a child in the period of teething.
He grew more irritable with Gitl every day, the energy failing him to dissemble his hatred for her. There were moments when, in his hopeless craving for the presence of Mamie, he would consciously seek refuge in a feeling of compunction and of pity for his wife; and on several such occasions he made an effort to take an affectionate tone with her. But the unnatural sound of his voice each time only accentuated to himself the depth of his repugnance, while the hysterical promptness of her answers, the servile gratitude which trembled in her voice and shone out of her radiant face would, at such instances, make him breathless with rage. Poor Gitl! she strained every effort to please him; she tried to charm him by all the simple-minded little coquetries she knew, by every art which her artless brain could invent; and only succeeded in making herself more offensive than ever.
As to Jake’s feelings for Joey, they now alternated between periods of indifference and gusts of exaggerated affection; while, in some instances, when the boy let himself be fondled by his mother or returned her caresses in his childish way, he would appear to Jake as siding with his enemy, and share with Gitl his father’s odium.
One afternoon, shortly after Jake’s interview with Mamie in front of the Chrystie Street tenement house, Fanny called on Gitl.
“Are you Mrs. Podkovnik?” she inquired, with an embarrassed air.
“Yes; why?” Mrs. Podkovnik replied, turning pale. “She is come to tell me that Jake has eloped with that Polish girl,” flashed upon her overwrought mind. At the same moment Fanny, sizing her up, exclaimed inwardly, “So this is the kind of woman she is, poor thing!”
“Nothing. I just want to speak to you,” the visitor uttered, mysteriously.