This scintillating celebrity his lost Gittel!
Bah! Misery had made him childish. Goldwater had, indeed, blossomed out since the days of his hired hall in Spitalfields, but his fame remained exclusively Yiddish and East-side. But Gittel!
How could that obscure rush-light of the London Ghetto Theatre have blazed into the Star of Paris and New York?
This Lent-keeping demoiselle the little Polish Jewess who had munched Passover cake at his table in the far-off happy days! This gilded idol the impecunious Gittel he had caressed!
'You ever seen this Yvonne Rupert?' he inquired of his neighbour, a pock-marked, spectacled young woman, who, as record-breaker of the establishment, had refused to join the strike of the mere hundred-and-fifty a day.
The young woman swiftly drew a knife from the wooden pail beside her, and deftly scraped at a rough hinge as she replied: 'No, but I guess she's the actress who gets all the flowers, and won't pay for 'em.'
He saw she had mixed up the two lawsuits, but the description seemed to hit off his Gittel to the life. Yes, Gittel had always got all the flowers of life, and dodged paying. Ah, she had always been diabolically clever, unscrupulously ambitious! Who could put bounds to her achievement? She had used him and thrown him away—without a word, without a regret. She had washed her hands of him as light-heartedly as he washed his of the dirty, sticky day's paste. What other 'pious philanthropist' had she found to replace him? Whither had she fled? Why not to Paris that her theatric gifts might receive training?
This chic, this witchery, with which reputation credited her—had not Gittel possessed it all? Had not her heroines enchanted the Ghetto?
Oh, but this was a wild day-dream, insubstantial as the smoke-wreaths of the Yvonne Rupert cigar!