"To the rabbis I leave what I don't know; it will help them to a longer life. To my enemies I leave my rheumatism. Between the Republican and Democratic parties I divide the boodle which they have not yet touched. To the Jewish editors I leave my broken pen, so that they can write slowly and avoid mistakes. My books—those intended for beginners—I leave to the eight professors, so that they can learn to read. As an executor there shall be appointed a man who knows Barnum's philosophy through and through. Written on my deathbed. Witness, Mr. Pluto of the Underground and his Famulus, the doctor. As an afterthought I leave to my publishers the last bill unpaid by me. They can frame it and keep it as an amulet to ward away that class of authors."
"Is it sarcastic?" asked Mr. Imber, chuckling delightedly.
Some time ago Mr. Imber sent the news of his own death to the various Hebrew and Yiddish publications. Many long obituaries—"very fine ones," said the poet—appeared.
"In that way," said Mr. Imber, "I learned who were my enemies. It had one evil consequence, however. When I afterward asked the editor to publish one of my articles he said:
"'You are officially dead, and as such cannot rush into print.'
"That reply really gave me a grievous moment," said the poet, with a shrewd, Voltairian smile.
AN INTELLECTUAL DEBAUCHEE
Four men sat excitedly talking in the little café on Grand Street where the Socialists and Anarchists of the Russian quarter were wont to meet late at night and stay until the small hours. An American, who might by chance have happened there, would have wondered what important event had occurred to rasp these men's voices, to cause them to gesticulate so wildly, to give their dark, intelligent faces so fateful, so ominous an expression. In reality, however, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. It was the usual course of human affairs which kept these men in a constant glow of unhappy emotion; an emotion which they deeply preferred to trivial optimism and the content founded on Philistine well-being. They were always excited about life, for life as it is constituted seemed to them very unjust.
It was nearly midnight, and the men in the café, altho they had drunk nothing stronger than Russian tea, talked on, seemingly intoxicated with ideas. One was the editor of a Yiddish newspaper in the quarter and a contributor to the Anarchistic monthly. He was a man of about forty years of age, lighter in complexion than his companions, but yet dark. Like them he was dressed carelessly and poorly. In his melancholy eyes shone a gentle idealism. He spoke in a voice lower and softer than those of his fellows. He was deeply liked by them, for he was capable of sweet and beautiful ideas about the perfect humanity, some of which he had put into a play which had a short life on the Bowery, but lived in the hearts of these warm intellectuals. Non-resistance to evil was the favorite principle of this gentle Anarchist, whose name was Blanofsky.
His companions were younger and more heated and violent in speech, tho their attenuated bodies and thoughtful and sensitive faces did not suggest reliance on physical force. On the Bowery the Irish tough fights after a word, but an all day dispute between two Jews on Canal or Hester Street is unaccompanied by the clenching of a fist. A dark, thin young man, whose closely shaven face seemed somehow to fit his spirit, given over entirely to the "movement," sat at Blanofsky's right hand. At almost any hour of the day or night Hermann Samarovitch could be found at the Anarchist headquarters on Essex Street, poring over the books of the propaganda and engaging in talk with other bright spirits of the "movement." Now, as he talked or listened in the café on Grand Street, his pale, smooth face seemed dead to all the ordinary interests of youth. The spirit of life was represented in him only by the passion for the cause, which burned in his black eyes. He had no other function than to worship at the shrine. How he lived, therefore, was a mystery.