“Yes. I feel like a different woman. But I don’t understand it.” He did not offer to kiss her that night, as was his custom, but waited for her to make the first advance. She did not seem to notice the omission.
He never spoke to her about the matter again. He never kissed her again.
The marvels of a woman’s mind, the leaps and bounds of the emotions, the gamut of passion upon which her fancy plays and lingers—all these are the despair of psychology. Yet their manifestation is sufficiently clear. How it came or whence it came, or why it came, even Miriam herself could not tell. But as a flash of lightning on an inky night reveals with vivid clearness what the darkness conceals, so the sudden revelation that she adored the man whom she had rejected lit up, for a brief moment, the gloom that had fallen upon her heart and laid bare the terrible dreary prospect of her life. It came like a thunderbolt. She loved him. She had always loved him. He was the lord and master whom her heart craved. The fire had been smouldering in her heart. Now it leaped into devouring flame. He loved her! He had fallen upon his knees and had tried to drag her toward him. He had sworn that his life would be wretched without her. And now that she was married he had thrown all the energies of his heart and soul into incessant toil in order that he might forget her. Married? She, the wife of Levine? A cry of despair broke from her lips.
Ah, yes. The lightning flash had passed. But she remembered what its brightness had revealed. She knew now!
For a long time—for many weeks—she often felt an almost irresistible impulse to scream aloud, so that her husband—so that all the world might hear: “I love him! Him only! No one but him.” But the heart learns to bear even agony in silence. Miriam settled down into the monotonous groove that fate had marked out for her. The revelation that had come to her so suddenly developed into a wall that rose between her and her husband. An invisible wall, yet each felt its presence, and after many ineffectual attempts to surmount this barrier, to woo and win her heart anew, Levine abandoned the effort and yielded to despair. She never told him, and he never knew—never even suspected. But after that they lived in different worlds—each equally wretched. For there is only one other lingering misery on earth that can compare with the lot of a woman who is married to one man with her heart and soul bound up in another. It is the lot of her husband.
For Miriam there was no consolation. Her secret was buried in her inmost soul; she was doomed to live out her life brooding over it. During the day she often cried. When her husband came home she met him with a calm face—often with a smile—and then they would sit and talk over trivial matters the while that her agony was eating into her heart.
And Levine—the torments that he endured were beyond all description! Of a sensitive temperament, yet endowed with a clear, critical, philosophic intellect, he sought for an explanation and a remedy in a scrutiny of every incident of their married life, in self-analysis, in the keenest introspection, and found nothing but that insurmountable wall. Nothing seemed credible or tangible save that dull gnawing pain in his heart. Once or twice the thought of self-destruction entered his head. Why he thrust it aside he could not say. He was not a coward. The prospect of fighting his way through life with that burden of misery upon his soul possessed infinitely more terrors for him than the thought of suicide. Nor did he pursue the suggestion sufficiently to come to the conclusion that it was unworthy. It was an alien thought, foreign to his nature, and could find no lodgment. That was all. He lived on and suffered.
Have you ever heard of Levine, the poet? He is a compositor in the printing-shop of the Jewish Workingman by day—he writes poetry, and, occasionally, short prose articles at night. He is not a genius. He is not a born singer. But his work is strong in its sincerity, and through it all runs a strain—that world-old strain of pleading—of weakness pleading for strength, of the oppressed pleading for justice. He is not a great poet, but among the readers of the Jewish Workingman, and among the loiterers in the East Side cafés, he is looked upon as a “friend of the masses.” And what they all marvel at is his prodigious industry. A day’s work in the composing-room of the Jewish Workingman is a task calculated to sap a man’s vitality to its last drop. Yet, this task completed, Levine throws himself with feverish activity into the composition of verse, and writes, and writes, and writes, until the lamp burns low. Sometimes, when he tires, he pauses to listen to the gentle breathing of his wife, who sleeps in the next room. It acts like a spur upon him; with renewed energy he plunges into his work.
The poem which the readers of the Jewish Workingman like best of all Levine’s writings is “Phantoms.” It ends—roughly translated from the Yiddish—like this:
And when the deepening gloom of night descends