Joey had tripped up to the lounge where he now stood watching his father with a stare in which there was more curiosity than fright.
The little woman lowered her crest. “Not at all! God be with you!” she said quickly, in a tone of abject cowardice, and involuntarily shrinking before the ferocious attitude of Jake’s strapping figure. “Who? What? When? I did not mean anything at all, sure. Gitl never said a word to me. A prohibition if she did. Come, Mr. Podkovnik, why should you get ektzited?” she pursued, beginning to recover her presence of mind. “By-the-bye—I came near forgetting—how about the boarder you promised to get me; do you remember, Mr. Podkovnik?”
“Talk away a toothache for your grandma, not for me. Who told her about danshin’ girls?” he thundered again, re-enforcing the ejaculation with an English oath, and bringing down a violent fist on the table as he did so.
At this Gitl’s sobs made themselves heard from the bedroom. They lashed Jake into a still greater fury.
“What is she whimpering about, the piece of stench! Alla right, I do hate her; I can not bear the sight of her; and let her do what she likes. I don’ care!”
“Mr. Podkovnik! To think of a sma’t man like you talking in this way!”
“Dot’sh alla right!” he said, somewhat relenting. “I don’t care for any danshin’ girls. It is a —— —— lie! It was that scabby greenhorn who must have taken it into her head. I don’t care for anybody; not for her certainly”—pointing to the bedroom. “I am an American feller, a Yankee—that’s what I am. What punishment is due to me, then, if I can not stand a shnooza like her? It is nu ushed; I can not live with her, even if she stand one foot on heaven and one on earth. Let her take everything”—with a wave at the household effects—“and I shall pay her as much cash as she asks—I am willing to break stones to pay her—provided she agrees to a divorce.”
The word had no sooner left his lips than Gitl burst out of the darkness of her retreat, her bangs dishevelled, her face stained and flushed with weeping and rage, and her eyes, still suffused with tears, flashing fire.
“May you and your Polish harlot be jumping out of your skins and chafing with wounds as long as you will have to wait for a divorce!” she exploded. “He thinks I don’t know how they stand together near her house making love to each other!”
Her unprecedented show of pugnacity took him aback.