“This is not the place for speaking,” he rejoined vehemently, in Yiddish. “Let us go to the Grand Street dock or to Seventh Street park. There we can speak so that nobody overhears us.”
“I bet you he is going to ask me to run away with him,” she prophesied to herself; and in her feverish impatience to hear him out she proposed to go on the roof, which, the evening being cool, she knew to be deserted.
When they reached the top of the house they found it overhung with rows of half-dried linen, held together with wooden clothespins and trembling to the fresh autumn breeze. Overhead, fleecy clouds were floating across a starry blue sky, now concealing and now exposing to view a pallid crescent of new moon. Coming from the street below there was a muffled, mysterious hum ever and anon drowned in the clatter and jingle of a passing horse car. A lurid, exceedingly uncanny sort of idyl it was; and in the midst of it there was something extremely weird and gruesome in those stretches of wavering, fitfully silvered white, to Jake’s overtaxed mind vaguely suggesting the burial clothes of the inmates of a Jewish graveyard.
After picking and diving their way beneath the trembling lines of underwear, pillowcases, sheets, and what not, they paused in front of a tall chimney pot. Jake, in a medley of superstitious terror, infatuation, and bashfulness, was at a loss how to begin and, indeed, what to say. Feeling that it would be easy for him to break into tears he instinctively chose this as the only way out of his predicament.
“Vot’s de madder, Jake? Speak out!” she said, with motherly harshness.
He now wished to say something, although he still knew not what; but his sobs once called into play were past his control.
“She must give you trouble,” the girl added softly, after a slight pause, her excitement growing with every moment.
“Ach, Mamielé!” he at length exclaimed, resolutely wiping his tears with his handkerchief. “My life has become so dark and bitter to me, I might as well put a rope around my neck.”
“Does she eat you?”
“Let her go to all lamentations! Somebody told her I go around with you.”